“In order to go into the wine business, you have to have a passion for it, you have to have a love for it.  Let’s say there are better businesses to go into, more profitable, more lucrative. Easier ways to make money,” explained Lenny Recanati, whose first career was in international banking and finance.

      “In other words, you go into it because you love it, not because it’s a business,” Recanati said. “It starts out as a hobby. When it makes money, it becomes a business.”

     The passion started in his childhood when his parents made wine from their vineyard in the garden behind his home in Haifa. His father was in shipping and he would always bring home bottles

     Today, Recanati has some 5,000 bottles in his cellar. Like many collectors he dreamed of having a winery and in 2000 he and a small group of investors open one in Israel’s Hefer Valley in the Upper Galilee.

     His new winemaker, Gil Shatsberg, like his predecessor Louis Pasco, trained at UC Davis. Shatsberg, 48, who previously worked at Golan Heights winery and founded the Israeli boutique winery at Amphorae, also traces his love of wine to a childhood on Kibbutz Tzora where he worked in the vineyard.

     After his service in the army, Shatsberg was determined to find a job where “it did not require me to be in the office the whole day, and that did not require me to be in the field all day and that it would involve art.” Winemaking met his requirements.

     Just as wine evolves over time, so do a winemaker’s style and goals.

   When he started out, Shatsberg tried to “take all the sunshine we have in Israel and push into the bottle and concentrate everything that I had in the bottle.” The resulting wines were dense, heavy and high in alcohol.

    But with experience, he changed his mind

    “They were too big,” he said. “I realized that when I couldn’t finish my own wine, that it was too heavy.”

     So now he aims for wines that are “are more elegant, less alcohol, less oaky, less tannic wines. Wine with finesse that are tasty, and fruity and you drink the vineyard and the sunshine in their elegance.”

    Winemakers in Israel, like their colleagues across the border in Lebanon, have to contend with obstacles that are manmade as well as Mother Nature. The most recent release of Recanati’s Reserve Merlot 2006 was made from grapes from the Ella Valley near Jerusalem, instead of the Upper Galilee.

     The conflict in the summer of 2006 kept the vintners out of the vineyards for a month and despite what was a late harvest, the grapes from the northern vineyards where the wine is usually sourced were just not up to snuff, Recanati said shaking his head.

   The result, even after spending 18 months in French oak barrels, is a Merlot with softer tannins and rounder feel beneath the red berry flavors.

    “It has the taste of the Judean hills,” Recanati said.

     And that is his goal. “Not to make Bordeaux or wines that come from California or Tuscany. But to make Israeli wines.”