Great Kosher Wine for Rosh Hashana (and year round)

Posted on September 21, 2008 - Filed Under Kosher and Jewish | 2 Comments

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 [...]

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Mark Spivak tours the Israeli wine route

Posted on September 8, 2008 - Filed Under Israeli wine industry | Leave a Comment

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 put [...]

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Why Israeli Wine is World Class (My Philosophy on What is Good Wine)

Posted on August 18, 2008 - Filed Under Israeli wine industry | 4 Comments

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 that [...]

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Israeli wine doesn’t suck: Bloomberg

Posted on July 23, 2008 - Filed Under Israeli wine industry | 1 Comment

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 [...]

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SF Chronicle: Israel’s wine industry reveals it’s California roots

Posted on June 24, 2008 - Filed Under Israeli wine industry, Wine Events | Leave a Comment

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 [...]

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On the Israeli wine web

Posted on May 13, 2008 - Filed Under Israeli wine industry, Wineries | 1 Comment

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 [...]

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Six wines for sixty years

Posted on May 12, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

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 the [...]

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Castel in the Wall Street Journal

Posted on February 25, 2008 - Filed Under Wineries | Leave a Comment

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 Revolution [...]

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Top 10 Kosher Wines for 2007

Posted on January 15, 2008 - Filed Under Kosher and Jewish | Leave a Comment

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. [...]

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A tour through some of Israel’s best wineries

Posted on January 1, 2008 - Filed Under Israeli wine industry, Wineries | Leave a Comment

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? I [...]

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