HaKerem: The Israeli Wine Blog

Carmel Mizrahi Winery was founded in 1882 and is, 126 years later, Israel’s largest and most famous winery. While not the first winery in Israel, it is the most well known and for many years (and even today) often serves as the face for Israeli wine. This can be good or bad, depending on which wines you are looking at and whether you are looking at ‘the old Carmel’ or ‘the new Carmel.’ I admit I am often critical of Carmel, as for many many years, it was not making good wine and is part of the reason why Israeli and kosher wine has a bad name. Of course, they were pretty much the only game in town even attempting to make table wines for over a hundred years, so they get some unfair criticism, even from me. Nevertheless, I’m glad that they are being forced to improve thanks to the rapid improvement and growth of the Israeli wine industry over the past two decades.

Having said that, I think its Kiddush wine – which I wish they would abolish but I’m sure it’s a big seller – is far far better than Manischewitz (which I dream of the day the ‘M’ word goes out of business). Yet, even today, it is making some not-so-good stuff with a very popular sacramental King David series and I wish it’s lower end Selected and Private Collection had more in common with the low-end wines of Golan Heights or Galil Mountain wineries or even the same-priced medium-range of Segal. Nevertheless, Carmel has been improving significantly over the past several years and their higher end stuff from the Appellation series and Single Vineyard (and the age-worthy but pricey Limited Edition) is very good and often excellent. It’s definitely worth trying some of the top stuff from Carmel. As Israel’s largest winery, they have such a wide variety and apparently are striving for significant improvement thanks to the tremendous competition and improvement in the Israeli wine world over the past decades. It’s very heartening to see them climb up after being hit hard by the rapid growth and competition of Israeli wine in the 1980s-early 2000s. And, their new boutique winery Yatir is absolutely excellent — anything from them is a winner and some of it is the best wine in Israel!

The history of Carmel is the history of Israeli wine – from just trying to plant anything and focusing on sweet wine for religious uses to making high quality kosher wine today.  I visited Carmel’s Winery in Zichron Ya’akov over Passover. I’m not going to publicly comment about the tour, in small part because Passover is always a crowded time and not as good as a tour when the entire country isn’t on vacation.

They are trying really hard to improve. I look forward to seeing what they are doing to improve and am even willing to help them on the marketing/consumer/business side any way that I can (not that I’m the expert, of course!).

And, of course, despite my ambivalent feelings about Carmel due to their long history and the company’s sometimes all-too-Israeli ‘yiyeh beseder, that’s the way we’ve always done it’ attitude (which is definitely changing due to the serious competition that they have only begun to experience in the past decade), the high end Appellation and Single Vineyard series have truly excellent wines. Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate gave Carmel scores of 88 or above on five wines and their absolutely excellent boutique winery Yatir got some of the highest scores – some of which are truly excellent prices and values (Carmel Kayoumi Shiraz as just one example).

Look forward for a behind-the-scenes look at Carmel in the next few months.