Just a year ago, I sang in these pages the praises of Yarden, Israel’s premier large-scale winery. Based on a trio of Yarden’s new releases, arriving in New York just in time for celebrations of the Jewish New Year, I’ll have to sing a little louder. One of those wines, in fact, looks, smells, tastes, and is priced like a new quality benchmark for Israeli red wine.

Some will say that Israel’s best wine is like Alaska’s best nude beach: Do we really want to go there? For too long, Israeli wine culture, though ancient, was a vinous backwater, focused mainly on sweet sacramental wines. Dry table wines were rarely more than tolerable, and often less than that.

War would be the unlikely change-agent for Israeli wines. In 1967, during the Six Day War, Israel wrested the Golan Heights away from Syria. Taking advantage of the Golan’s relatively cool, occasionally even snowy, climate, Israeli farmers first planted apple orchards at elevations averaging 3,000 feet. Then, in the mid-1970s, a team of visiting American enologists suggested that fine wine grapes could also thrive on the Golan ridges. Several orchards were duly ripped out and replaced with vineyards. The cooperative agricultural villages that owned them named their new winery Yarden, the Hebrew word for Jordan. That name is reserved for the winery’s top tier. Budget labels are called Gamla and Golan.

Right from the first, Yarden’s wines were characterized by clean, varietally accurate flavors. That was revolutionary enough for Israeli wines. Just as striking was the winery’s decision to downplay the “kosher” label; it was moved to the back of the bottle. Yarden wanted you to buy the wine for its quality, not for its rabbinical seal. Yarden was fairly lonely as a domestic

fine-wine producer until the 1990s, when a spate of ambitious new wineries sprung up. So did an Israeli public eager to drink well. These newly minted wine buffs can be an intrepid bunch, as I learned at a wine fair held in Tel Aviv in the spring of 2003. The long-planned event, at which around 70 domestic wineries poured samples, fell smack in the middle of the Iraq War, firing up just a few hundred miles away. Fearful of Saddam’s Scud missiles, perhaps tipped with poison gas, the Israeli government ordered citizens to carry gas masks. But that didn’t postpone the wine fair. It was mobbed by thousands of tasters who, luckily, ended up sniffing wine instead of gas. I even saw a stylish Israeli woman with a Prada bag slung over one shoulder and her gas mask over the other. I felt reasonably stylish myself dangling both my gas mask and a Zabar’s tote.

Yarden’s wines have always been classy, winning a surprising number of prizes at top international competitions. Still, their style has sometimes been more mannerly than exciting. With these three new releases, however, comes an extra dollop of depth and thrust. One is the “Odem” organic chardonnay 2002.The other two are Yarden’s standard bearers, the Katzrin chardonnay 2002 and the 2000 red simply called Katzrin, both named for the town where the winery is located.

Most Yarden wines are blended from vineyards strung along the Golan ridge up to 3,900 feet. The coolest of them, like Odem, are generally best for chardonnay. This is Yarden’s first vineyard-designated wine as well as its first to be certified organic. The wine has a lovely balance of vivid floral, citrus, and minerally flavors. It’s full-bodied yet light on its feet. I paid $17 for it at Skyview Discount Wines & Liquors in the Bronx, the leading kosher wine specialist, and got my money’s worth.

The Katzrin Chardonnay 2002 is a fiercer wine than the Odem, a real blast of oaky, full-throttle fruit, oily texture, and tannin. Yet, over the course of a meal, it does not wear you out the way some fat and alcoholic New World chardonnays do. This wine will very likely smooth out and purr deeply in the glass after a couple of years. It’s listed at $30.

While Katzrin chardonnay is made in most years, the red version is rarer. Winemaker Victor Schoenfeld last made one in 1996. Clearly, he has been watching and waiting for a vintage in which he could raise the Golan’s bar of quality. His patience paid off in 2000. In the glass, this Katzrin trends from purple around the edges to almost black at the center, a harbinger of flavor concentration. The wine sent up a deep aroma of cedar melded with a touch of tobacco, evoking the first top-class bordeaux that I experienced more than 25 years ago. It remains a mystery to me how a wine that is matured in oak can so vividly evoke cedar. But if there were no mysteries in wine, why not just drink beer?

From first sip, this Katzrin 2000 claimed full attention. Its intense, dark-berry flavor seemed to be rising from a deep well of flavor. Rosemary-flecked roast lamb was on my plate, and as I started to take a bite, I held off. That was because, more than 30 seconds after sipping the Katzrin, it still held tight to my taste buds. Without that kind of persistence, no wine can be memorable.

And I do expect to remember this Katzrin. Its suggested retail price of $85 is the highest I’ve ever seen asked for an Israeli wine. Around 200 cases are allotted to the New York metropolitan area. After a delay caused by a port strike in Israel, the Katzrin is scheduled to arrive this week. (I tasted an air-shipped sample.) Some wine shops will shy away from a kosher wine approaching $100 including tax, but it is sure to be stocked at Skyview (5681 Riverdale Ave., Riverdale, N.Y., 718-601-8222).

While Yarden wines are kosher, they are not “mevushal,” a flash boiling process that allows the bottled wine to be served by non-Jews. Yarden has always refused to boil its wines, which would prevent the flavor development that better wines undergo in bottle. One result of this policy is that kosher restaurants, such as midtown’s Prime Grill and the Upper West Side’s Talia’s Steakhouse, are not permitted by rabbinical authorities to carry Yarden wines.

You will, however, find Yarden’s regular bottling of the superb 2000 cabernet sauvignon on the wine list at the incomparable, but unkosher, Peter Luger Steak House for $43. And that’s only poetic justice. All along, Yarden wanted to accepted on its merits, and not because it is kosher.