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Wine and politics in the Golan
“This is the best place in all the country for good wines,” Shalom Blayer, chief executive of Golan Heights Winery, told me today, referring to the 690-square mile sparsely-populated volcanic plateau that rises to the northeast of the Sea of Galilee.
It is home to eight boutique Israeli wineries, as well as the Golan Heights Winery, Israel’s No. 1 wine exporter and “a driving force in its modern wine industry,” according to a recent issue of Wine Spectator. The magazine called the kosher winery’s Yarden label “top of the line.”
Israel’s leaders often talk of the need to make painful concessions for peace with their neighbors. Israel and Syria will soon enter into a fourth round of indirect negotiations over the Golan, seized by Israel in 1967 and considered occupied Syrian land by the United Nations. The renewed talks began in May and the underlying premise, exchanging the Golan for peace, is unpopular in Israel.
According to opinion polls, three-quarters of Israelis do not support giving up the Golan in a peace deal with Syria. In a small, crowded country, the Golan is an escape. In the winter there is skiing, in the summer hiking, and all year around wine tasting.
Israel and Syria first flirted with a peace deal in 1991 and a few times since.
“You can pack all your baggage and sit on your baggage and wait, but you cannot live this way,” Blayer said. “Until it happens, we are planting, we are investing.”
The winery reinvests between $2.4 million and $3.6 million annually, according to Blayer. It produces 5.5 million bottles a year and in 2007 reported revenues of $45 million.
But, Blayer, like most of the 20,000 Jewish Israelis living in the Golan, is secular and not living there according to religious ideology. While he said he would disagree with his government if it handed back the Golan, he would leave his home of 33 years without a fight.
As for wine, he said there are other regions — the Galilee and Judean Hills near Jerusalem — that produce good wine grapes.
“Israelis,” Blayer told me, “would not go thirsty.”
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