Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 1, 2018

Winemaking in the Land of Israel Goes Back Five Millennia, So Why Do Israelis Keep Planting French-Style Varieties?

Bringing back indigenous viticulture.

The Bible makes frequent reference to wine and to the promised land’s suitability for viticulture, and archaeologists have evidence of wine production in the Levant going back at least to the beginning of the third millennium BCE. Yet oenologists long assumed that the Muslim conquest in the 7th century CE put an end to the wine business, and modern Israel’s many wineries uniformly rely on European varieties of grape and styles of wine. Kevin Begos wants Israeli vintners to revive indigenous varieties:

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