The Jewish holidays are a great time to find lots of Israeli wine – even if you aren’t Jewish. Rosh Hashana and Sukkot, two great feasting holidays, are coming up soon (Rosh Hashana begins this year on the night of September 29 and lasts two days) and this is a great chance to buy kosher […]
Mark Spivak, a wine reviewer who has written for the Palm Beach Post and Palm Beach Media Group, and other Florida and national magazines, and is the host of a wine show on NPR, recently visited Israel. After not visiting Israel for over 15 years, Spivak was in for a shock. His past experience: To […]
Israeli wine is world class. Yes, we’ve heard this recently from the likes of Robert Parker, Mark Squires, Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Spectator, Decanter, and other wine critics and trade publications. But I think they’ve all got it a bit wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with their scores and I’ll take the 93 […]
Bloomberg gets the message that Israeli wine doesn’t suck. I’m a little surprised that the article used the traditional framing of “Israeli wine used to suck, now kosher wine is good” (making the association between bad kosher American wine with great Israeli wine [which wasn’t always kosher, even]). This is especially surprising coming from such […]
Interesting article about Israeli wine, especially Flam – whose father was the first Israeli to study at the University of California Davis’s winemaking program and was the winemaker at Carmel for decades. In honor of the Jewish Vinter’s event in California last weekend, several Israeli winemakers were there including Golan Flam (of Flam), Assaf Paz […]
Anyone who knows me knows that one of my passions is wine marketing and especially emerging technologies and wine marketing. Well, not entirely emerging (although I do remember first surfing the web in the 1990s and reading Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat – one of my new favorite books — brought back some fond […]
Check out this new article by Adam Montefiore on the history of Israel wine since independence. As Israel celebrates Yom Hatzma’ut – Independence Day for the 60th time, I have been given the task to look back and select a wine to cover each decade. This is not necessarily meant to be a list of […]
I’m up visiting wineries up north, but in the meantime read this fascinating article about Eli Ben-Zaken and Domaine du Castel from the Wall Street Journal. Why does it seem that Castel is the only winery with a good PR strategy (and, of course, one of Israel’s best!) Israel’s New Revolution in Quality Israel’s New […]
Gamliel Kronemer, the New York Jewish Week’s wine writer, has just released his Top 10 kosher wines for 2007. While missing out on many of the great non-certified Israeli wines (Flam, Margalit, Pelter, Clos de Gat, Odem Mountain [going certified starting with the 2007 vintages] and many more), about half the list is Israeli wines. […]
I just found this video on ISRAEL21c‘s beta site. ISRAEL21c is a great place that tells the story of Israel – it’s technology, arts, humanitarian efforts, and culture … including winemaking. Among other stories, I wrote an article on Domaine du Castel for them. Did you know that Sea Horse Winery’s owner/winemaker was in film? […]
The World Cup is here. No, not of soccer, but rather of wine. The Grape Thinking blog “A better way to think about wine” and Taste Vine, a new Web 2.0 app that creates “taste semantic recommendations”, have launched the World Cup of Wine. In their own words: WCOW is a competition that […]
From israelplug: In 1988, Eli-Gilbert Ben-Zaken decided to prove that Israeli wines could be up to European standard. He borrowed millions of dollars and started the Domaine du Castel Winery on a hillside near Jerusalem. The entrepreneur learned mostly from going to wine shows, tasting wines, reading books and looking at the technical equipment. The […]
