Dandy is a small, premium winery co-founded by Assaf Lavi and his closest friend Moti - run with the logic of an independent record label: each wine arrives as its own release, with a distinct name, label, atmosphere, and story. Not a house style. Not a product line. A catalog with a sound.
The Syrah comes from a specific vineyard high on Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee - made in a courtyard rather than a facility because scale was never the ambition. Late ripening, slow fermentations, serious extraction when the fruit asks for it, and elevage in top Burgundy barrels push the wines toward dense, mountain-grown expressions that land between 15% and 16% alcohol.
Assaf and Moti's friendship was built on fringe music, avant-garde listening, jazz, and punk. That became part of the structure of Dandy: each bottle treated as a release, each release carrying its own tone. The wines are poured in selected chef restaurants in Tel Aviv and across Israel.
There is no fixed series. Each vintage can become a differently named release with its own visual language, emotional register, and place inside the wider catalog.
The coherence comes from authorship, not repetition.
Wine, label, bottle, and writing are edited together as one body of work. That is the structure behind Dandy: not a product line, but a growing catalog with its own ear, mood, and internal logic.
Two tanks, two yeasts, two trajectories. The same fruit, the same source, already dividing during fermentation.
Syrah 2020 began with one vineyard and one fruit source, but almost immediately split into two distinct paths. As the grapes arrived at the winery, the fruit was divided between two fermentation tanks. Each tank received a different yeast: one a culture rooted in spontaneous fermentations from California, the other a strain from France's Rhone Valley.
The divergence became noticeable already during fermentation. Even though the grapes were identical, each tank began pulling the wine in its own direction. As the wines moved into elevage, the distinction became sharper still: not a minor variation, but two clearly separate expressions of the same DNA.
Over the course of two years of aging, each wine continued along its own path and was given a barrel with a different toast level. Time, oak, and yeast deepened the separation. By the end of the process, the two wines still shared the same origin, yet spoke in two different languages. One became denser, deeper, more forceful and compact. The other remained on a similar flavour scale, but opened into something lighter in movement, a little brighter, with more air around it.
This is very much what we do at Dandy: work with wine as a living material, open to interpretation, division, listening, and search. Like a release on an independent label, the same source can unfold into two voices, two movements, two closely related but unmistakably different worlds.
The labels are not packaging added afterward. They belong to the same release logic as the wine. Each bottle carries its own cover image, its own name, and its own emotional frame, while remaining part of one imprint.
This is part of the structure of Dandy. The way a great record label can release wildly different music and still remain unmistakably itself. Assaf's background in visual storytelling, editing, and branding runs through the whole project, and the bond with Moti was built in music culture first: fringe records, avant-garde listening, jazz, punk, and the conviction that tone matters as much as category. Not a brand guideline. A shared ear.
Dandy treats each bottle as a release: made in a courtyard, named with intent, and sent into the world with its own tone.
Since 2018, Assaf and Moti have been building Dandy as a place where wine, image, text, and release identity are shaped together. The wines appear in selected chef restaurants in Tel Aviv and across Israel. Open to collaborations that need wine knowledge, visual direction, narrative framing, and a strong authored point of view - ideally all four.
