The Israeli Wine industry goes way back to Biblical times. However, until most recently, it was not something to be proud of. In earlier times the wines were so bad that it was actually a very positive thing for the Muslims to impose a break of 1200 years of local wine production.
With the aid of the famous Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Jews began to produce wine again in 1870 although most of the wine produced was sweet, unsophisticated and unappealing. It took the Israeli Wine Industry another 90 years until the 1960s to get rid of it reputation of producing wines too sweet and too coarse.
These days the Israeli Wine Industry is totally different and its wine considered equally as good as the wines of Australia, California and other New World wine producing countries. Some of the Israeli wine is even considered as excellent as that of the wines of the respected Chateaux of France.
There are several opinions why the Israeli wine industry has improved so much. One opinion says that it is because many Israelis began to travel abroad and started to demand the same quality of wine as they tasted abroad. Other opinions say that Israelis began to demand a higher quality of wine after the opening of the Golan Heights Winery in 1983 and the exposure to an improved quality of wine.
The Golan Heights winery built an excellent winery without any of the boundaries of winemaking tradition and with a lot of enthusiasm together with the knowledge of young American winemakers.
This winery also established a new tradition in the Israeli grape industry when they began to encourage vineyard owners to improve the quality of grape that they grew.
Moreover, they have moved to focus on making wine from Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc,
Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Riesling and Gewürztraminer. These kinds of wines made the winery much more famous than before and it is the only winery in the world that was awarded the Chairman's Award for Excellence at Vinexpo on several separate occasions.
Besides the Golan Heights making huge progress in wine other wineries in Israel joined the trend of making much more high quality wines. The Israeli wine industry today contains six major wineries plus several boutique wineries that produce very high quality wines.
The major wineries in Israel are:
The Golan Heights Winery
The Carmel-Mizrachi Winery
Barkan Wineries
Baron Wineries (also known as the Tishbi Winery)
Binyamina Wineries
Ephrat Winery
Dalton Wineries
Some of the wineries are open to the public for Wine Tours where you can take a guided tour of the winery, enjoy a wine-tasting experience and an excellent meal. Amongst the large Israeli wineries that are open to the public you can find the Golan Heights winery (in the north-east of Israel), the Carmel-Mizrachi Winery (in the Center of Israel - Zichron Yaacov and Rishon Le-zion) and the Binyamina winery.
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