We hosted an Israeli wine tasting in Houston this week and nearly 150 people attended.

I brought to the party two wines we import that made it onto Israeli food & wine critic Daniel Rogov’s Top 10 Israeli Wines List last year:

Margalit Special Reserve Cabernet 2006

and

Flam Cabernet Reserve 2005

When I arrived to the event in Houston, I asked The Tasting Room’s top sommelier, Tony, to select what he believed to be the best comparable Cabs in his cellar and have someone bag all of the wines so that at the end of the evening he and I and everyone in the audience could taste and rank them blind.

Here are the 2 Cabs The Tasting Room picked for the friendly blind-tasting competition:

Stags Leap Napa Valley Cabernet 2005 and Rubicon Estate Cask Cab 2005

People: these are serious wines representative of the good quality Cabs Napa is producing. I did not pick these wines; The Tasting Room did.

Tony and I each selected blind the Flam Cabernet Reserve 2005 as our favorite wine of the four.

The audience overwhelmingly picked the Margalit as their favorite and the Flam wine as their very close second.

It wasn’t close. The Israeli wines were overwhelmingly preferred by all of us that night.

Was this a scientific experiment? Ummm no, of course not.

Was it fun? YES

Was it meaningful and surprising? YES

What’s the message? The Original Wine World has re-emerged as a powerhouse wine producer and only a few people have noticed yet but that’s all about to change.

We’re going to keep doing more and more of these friendly blind tastings everywhere I go.

And they’re going to become more formalized and receive more attention.

I just bet the news of this one makes into the Houston Chronicle…..stay tuned….