After they had left Egypt and approached Canaan, Moses sent twelve spies across the river to explore the Promised Land. When they returned to their encampment to advise Moses, only Joshua and Caleb were in favor of entering the new land. The other spies, however, had not been particularly impressed by what they found and because they advised against entering the new land, the Israelites began their 40 year trek through Sinai. Fortunately, however, two of the spies had returned with a cluster of grapes and, according to folklore, those grapes yielded enough wine to last the people for their forty years in the wilderness. Nobody today is sure just how that wine tasted. There is a good chance, however, that it was terrible.

Wine has been made in Israel since pre-Biblical times but, if the truth be known, until recently, there was no reason to be proud of those wines. The wines shipped to ancient Egypt were so bad that they had to be seasoned with honey, pepper and juniper berries to make them palatable, and those sent to Rome and England during the height of ancient Roman civilization were so thick and sweet that no modern connoisseur could possibly approve of them. So bad were most of these wines that it was probably a good thing that the Moslem conquest in AD 636 imposed a 1,200 year halt to the local wine industry.

Even in 1870, when wine production started again, thanks to the aid of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, not all went smoothly, and most of the wine that was produced was red, sweet, unsophisticated and unappealing. In 1875, for example, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was given a bottle of kosher red wine from Palestine. After taking a few sips, Disraeli observed that it tasted "not so much like wine but more like what I expect to receive from my doctor as a remedy for a bad winter cough". Well into the 1960s, Israel justifiably suffered from a reputation of producing wines too sweet and too coarse to appeal to knowledgeable drinkers.

Sophisticated wine lovers know that the local wineries have risen out of the morass of cheap, cloyingly sweet wines that burn the throat and bring tears to the cheeks. As wine writer Oz Clarke has said, "Israel is now on the world winemap", and many local dry red and white wines are now as good as some of the fine wines of California, Australia and others of the so-called "new-world" wine producing countries. In fact, some Israeli wines are so good that they are compared favorably to the wines of the respected chateaux of France. Sometimes fruity and on other occasions crisply dry, and often with excellent balance, body and bouquet, Israeli wines are now perceived as an integral and important part of dining out.

Some speculate that the demand for more sophisticated wines within Israel came about because as more and more Israelis traveled abroad, especially to Europe, they came to realize that wine had more than mere ceremonial value. It is probably equally accurate, however, to state that Israelis began to demand better wines when they were exposed to the wines of the Golan Heights Winery which opened in 1983. Unbound by either outdated winemaking traditions or a large, sometimes hard-to-move corporate structure, the young winery imported good vine stock from California, built a state-of-the-art winery, and added to this the enthusiasm and knowledge of young American winemakers who had been trained at the University of California at Davis.

Equally important, the Golan winery began to encourage vineyard owners to improve the quality of their grapes and, in the American tradition, paid bonuses for grapes with high sugar and acid content and rejected those grapes they perceived as substandard. The winery was also the first to realize that wines made from Grenache, Semillon, Petit Sirah and Carignan grapes would not put them on the world wine map and focused on planting and making wines from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, white Riesling and Gewurztraminer.

The Golan wines were a success from the beginning, their second wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from the 1984 vintage, winning a gold medal at the International Wine and Spirit Competition. In fact, at this writing, the winery is the only one in the world to have been awarded the Chairman's Award for Excellence at Vinexpo on three separate occasions. The winery, which is owned by the kibbutim and other cooperative farms that supply them with grapes, now produces over 4.5 million bottles annually, and is currently increasing their output by about 20% annually.

Many other wineries have made major steps forward in improving the quality of their wines. There are now six major wineries and a rapidly growing host of boutique wineries in the country, many of which are producing wines that are of high quality and a few producing wines good enough to interest connoisseurs and wine lovers wherever they happen to find themselves in the world.

To see a list of Israeli wineries and critiques of their wines, click here.

To read about Wine Consumption within Israel, click here.

To read about tourism possibilities at Israeli wineries, click here.

© Daniel Rogov