At this time it had also become obvious that the economy was running into hard times, most of my distributors around the world were already lamenting the demise of the $30+ bottle of wine; here in Israel the line has been drawn at about 100 shekels. In light of these circumstances I felt that we had to be mindful of our customers needs and provide them with more choice at the lower price points.

Thinking about those wines and the new economic reality, I realised that it might be possible to extend the Canaan series to include a single varietals such as Cabernet and Merlot into the portfolio. Further, the interesting young Cab from Meron could be released as a limited edition, mid priced, single vineyard wine.
On 27 Jan 2009 we made a decision to produce and bottle 3 completely new wines by 1 March which would be ready for drinking by Passover (8 April 09). This gave me 30 days to prepare a concept and have the labels printed, and Naama a month to have the wines blended, filtered and stable for bottling.

My first call was to my graphic designer to give her the brief. The brief for the canaan wines was fairly simple, extend the canaan range to include two new wines, the basic design was there, we had to choose colours and come up with copy for the labels. Conceptually, the Meron wine was a little more complex, devise a single vineyard wine from Meron, which shouldn’t be confused with the more expensive and somewhat superior wine of 2005.

Emails went backwards and forwards with design suggestions and colour options. This one yes that one no, back to the drawing board for that one, until we finally found the suitable labels.



In the meantime we tasted the wines in the winery to see how they had developed. The canaans were looking good, but the SV was looking a bit iffy and I could see that Naama wasn’t 100% confident in it, still, we had invested in a new label and I didn’t want to give up on it too quickly.


Time marched on the graphics were ready for printing, we had prepared a press release about the three wines and I was finalizing the details with the printers about producing the labels. Then one morning about three days before we were going to print Moshe called me to tell me that Naama was feeling uncomfortable about one of the wines and I should talk to her, which I did. She was uncomfortable with the SV Cab, feeling that the wine was not special enough and would harm our credibility. OK, it was a fair comment, so we scrapped the wine, cancelled the printers and modified the press release.

The remaining labels were printed at Tadbik on Thursday 26 Feb and the wines were bottled on Monday 2 March.


Now we will only have two new wines for Passover. They are solid wines and will retail for about 45 Shekels ($11). Unfortunately the wines will be available in Israel only due to the complexities of the Shmitta (Sabbatical) year. The wines should be available in the stores in two to three weeks.