One week ago at The Jug Shop in San Francisco (love that city) we held a blind trade tasting between California and Israeli Cabs with 6 winery marketing people and San Fran sommeliers. Here are the Israeli wines we entered into the mix: Flam Cabernet Reserve 2006 Margalit Special Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Tzora Shoresh [...]

Meet Asaf Margalit (right), winemaker and co-owner of Margalit Winery. We sat down with Asaf and asked about his life, his wines and his thoughts about the future of the Israeli wine industry. You can Buy Margalit Wines Here Now You can Visit Margalit Winery’s Website Here About Asaf Q:  Tell us about yourself and [...]

Five of the hand-crafted wines from Israel I import are in a reefer right this moment on their way to leading retailer Wine Library in NJ, owned by Gary Vaynerchuk and his family, where they will fill a shelf in a new ISRAELI category (!!). I took representatives from Flam, Margalit, Pelter, Tulip and Tzora wineries [...]

Tzora Vineyards‘ winemaker Eran Pick, who trained in winemaking at UC Davis, sent me this picture today. He calls it Harvest at Dawn. I love the way this picture captures a mood and a place.

I hope you can join us for the second in a series of friendly “blind” wine competitions we are hosting between a handful of Israeli Cabernets I import and some well-known California Cabs. The first (you may recall!) was with some good friends in Houston! The August 24th event is at The Jug Shop in [...]

Late last week, 420 cases of the new wines I bought from the top 5 wineries in Israel cleared US Customs and settled into our warehouse in Benicia, just south of Napa. And so I got to thinking about how I came to select these particular wines and what it means to be a wine [...]

I’m always looking for ways to expand people’s understanding of what Israel is all about, introducing you to the Real Israel, behind what I call the “CNN curtain” on the lives of real people there. My pal Sarah Peguine, who writes a great blog about the intriguing art scene in Tel Aviv, has written a [...]

I wake up early pretty much every day. One of the first things I do while it is still dark out is breeze through overnight emails (often from friends and colleagues in Israel) and scan the Web and my Google Alert emails for interesting stories to share. Earlier this week, I caught a story on [...]