Morpccp:Country looks to expand wine exports

Wine has an ancient history in Morocco: One of the white grape varieties in Ebertec's line of wines, faranah, has been cultivated in Morocco for 4,000 years, Chain said. Until Morocco reclaimed its independence in 1956, it was a major wine producer, mostly of inexpensive wine for French consumption.

In much of Europe, "wines from Africa and especially ones from North Africa are seen in a very bad quality," Chain said. That should start to change now that Morocco is taking a new approach to an old product, aiming for quality instead of quantity, but its most promising markets are the United States, Great Britain, Scandinavia, Russia and "new-consuming countries" such as China, where high-quality Moroccan wines don't have to overcome the lingering reputation of their low-cost ancestors.

In winemaking, quantity can be the enemy of quality: Vines are heavily pruned to produce less fruit with a greater concentration of flavor. Chain said the grapes in Ebertec's wines are picked by hand to ensure that they are at the proper stage of ripeness. And the vineyards are working toward certification as organic. Chain noted that although Ebertec's parent company, Diana Holding, has diverse interests, its president, Brahim Zniber, is a devoted wine grower.

For the most part, Ebertec's wines use grape varieties familiar to Americans, with an emphasis on those that thrive around the Mediterranean. The winemaker in charge is French. But Chain said the goal is to produce wines as expressions of the place where they are made - its mountains, its climate and its soil, what wine enthusiasts call terroir.

"We do not want to copy. We are producing the same grape varieties, but in a Moroccan way," Chain said. "We do not want to look like, I don't know, Châteauneuf-du-Pape [a wine of southern France]. It's not our future. We have a soil, very particular. We have a sun, very particular. It's the terroir."

One challenge for Moroccan wines in the United States is that relatively few Americans are of Moroccan descent - a bit more than one in 10,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But Chain said that his target is the general wine-buying public, and that one way to reach it is by getting his offerings onto the wine lists of Moroccan restaurants. He used the Summer Fancy Food Show in Washington as an opportunity to pour his products for potential distributors and others in the food industry.

"We are beginning on the U.S. market, so firstly we want to present our production. We want to make the U.S. consumer aware about our products. That's the first step," he said. "Firstly we have to make you know that we exist," and then increase commercial efforts.

The wine will win a following, Chain said, just as wines from Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand have gained shares of the U.S. market in recent decades: "We have good wines, you have good consumers here, and it will match."