Israel is a tiny country but surprisingly it has many diverse geographic regions, from the mountains in the north to the deserts in the south. As far as wine regions go, there are officially 5 regions but they were determined in the 1960s before the wine industry really developed. They don’t encompass today’s reality on the ground. Different regions mean different elevations, rainfall, climates, humidity and soil. As far as wine goes, Israel can be divided into six different natural regions from north to south based on these characteristics. The regions are the Golan Heights, the Galilee, the Carmel Mountain Range, the Sharon Plain, the Judean Hills and Shfela Coastal Plain and the Negev Des
As I mentioned in my first article about wine making in Israel, the industry ended abruptly with the Arab Conquest in the 7th century. In the mid-1800s, while still under Ottoman Muslim rule, a few Jewish families started producing and selling wine for religious uses. However, the real story of Israeli wine production starts with a man named Baron Edmund de Rothschild of the famed Rothschild banking family. Baron Rothschild was known as the Great Benefactor in the early years of the Zionist movement to settle Jews in the Land of Israel. The First Aliyah (wave of Jewish immigration) is considered to have taken place between 1882 and 1903. Most of the people came from czarist Russia and Romani
