Standing among the vines high in the Judean Hills, Golan Flam sometimes tells himself his vineyard does not really belong to him. Ancient agricultural terraces tumble down the slopes below us, carved into startlingly green hillsides that have been cultivated for thousands of years.
“I’m merely a guest in this amazing landscape,” says Flam, whose family established Flam Winery in 1998. “I often stand on one of these viewpoints and say to myself, ‘Wow.’”
Less than an hour from both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem lies a wine country whose story stretches back not decades or centuries, but millennia. These are the hills and valleys of ancient Judah: the Sorek Valley traversed by the biblical Samson; the Valley of Elah, where David confronted Goliath.
Ancient wine presses remain cut into the rock and agricultural terraces survive from before the First Temple period.
When brothers Golan and Gilad Flam founded Flam Winery, there were only four wineries in the region. Today there are more than 40.
Golan studied winemaking in Italy. Flam now produces around 180,000 bottles annually, working largely with classic French grapes including Merlot, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, every harvest carried out by hand.
Vineyards in the Judean Hills[Missing Credit]
These are modern wines. Yet at Flam’s spectacular Even Sapir vineyard, the vines grow across ancient agricultural terraces, as though two eras of Jewish agriculture have somehow been laid one on top of another.
At Tzora Vineyards, Eran Pick takes this idea of place further.
Pick is the first and one of only two Israelis to hold the prestigious Master of Wine qualification. But for all his international expertise, his obsession is intensely local.
This year is Pick’s 21st harvest. Tzora now produces five wines and around 120,000 bottles annually, and has appeared in Wine Spectator’s Top 100.
“The beautiful thing about wine is that it’s a story of the place,” Pick says. “Each area has its own identity, people, culture, wine.”
He describes his own wine almost as if describing a person: “elegant”, “confident”, “not trying to impress”.
“The appellation is not important – it’s the only thing that matters,” he says. “The wine needs to talk about the place. Fine wine really talks about the place.”
A bottle of Flam wine[Missing Credit]
Since 2020, that place has had legal recognition. Judea became Israel’s first wine region formally registered as an Appellation of Origin, with the Judean Hills and Judean Foothills as sub-regions – geographical designations designed to establish where a wine comes from and what connects it to that land.
But the official designation merely caught up with a revolution that had already been taking place for three decades.
One of its pioneers was Domaine du Castel’s Eli Ben Zaken, an Egyptian-born, Brighton-educated Israeli whose route into wine began almost by chance.
Ben Zaken arrived in Israel through Haifa and eventually bought a farm at Moshav Ramat Raziel in the Jerusalem hills. His first wine, in 1992, amounted to just two barrels – around 600 bottles.
Today his family’s two wineries produce roughly 600,000 bottles and export to some 20 countries, including Britain. Cabernet, Chardonnay and other international varieties mature in French oak, while Castel even produces sparkling wine using the traditional method.
Staff affectionately call Ben Zaken “a legend”. In barely a generation, what began with two barrels has become part of a premium Israeli wine industry recognised around the world.
At family-run Bazak Winery, owner Hanan Bazak still lives above the winery. The family makes around 40,000 bottles a year and works with varieties including Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Viognier and Roussanne.
It is also experimenting with ancient local grapes identified through recent research – part of a wider attempt to understand the indigenous varieties that once grew here.
At Agur Winery in the Elah Valley, owner Elad Katz is equally determined that history should never become a marketing substitute for good wine.
“We don’t put our local patriotism before taste – it has to go together,” he says. “Every wine has to reflect some aspect of the terroir.”
Agur, founded in 1999, has grown from around 10,000 bottles annually when Katz bought it to some 100,000 today. Its wines have Hebrew names and its blends can contain six or seven of the 19 grape varieties with which it works.
“The wine speaks a local dialect in an international language,” Katz says.
At Sphera, Israel’s only winery devoted entirely to white wines, that changing culture is evident in the glass.
Sima Ravhon runs the family business with her winemaker husband Doron, producing Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc. Production has grown from 12,000 to around 60,000 bottles annually.
“Our passion is growing our grapes and our children in the same place,” she says.
It may be the most Israeli description of a winery I hear: family, agriculture, future and attachment to land compressed into a single sentence.
I stayed at Logos Hotel at Yad Hashmona sits 700 metres above sea level amid the wooded Judean Hills. Its original guest rooms are built from Finnish pine logs, a clue to the remarkable story of the community around it.
Yad Hashmona was established in 1971 by Finnish Christians and named in memory of eight Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled to Finland but were handed over to the Gestapo in 1942. Seven were murdered at Auschwitz; only one survived.
The founders saw establishing a community in Israel as an act of remembrance and atonement.
Beside the hotel a Biblical Garden attempts to bring the agricultural world of ancient Israel back to life. Among vineyards, olive trees and herbs are a wine press, olive press and mikveh, alongside a reconstruction of a Galilean-style synagogue.
After a day spent hearing winemakers talk about reviving the past, it is strangely moving to sleep somewhere founded for precisely the same impulse: to remember what came before while building something new.
The region’s complicated modern identity is never far away either.
At Lucky Bun in the Arab village of Ein Rafa, American-born chef Jalil “JJ” Jalil has created what he describes as Israel’s first restaurant serving food that is both halal and kosher.
It opened on October 1, 2023 – six days before Israel changed forever.
“There’s nothing political about this,” Jalil says. “It’s something very special. Jews or Arabs, people sit together here – religious Jews, women in hijab.”
Musakhan, roast chicken stuffed with rice and meat and vegetables with fermented-lemon dip share the menu with cholent and burgers. Nearby, Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, deliberately founded as a shared Jewish-Arab
village, offers another glimpse of the country beyond the familiar Jerusalem and Tel Aviv city tours.
But eventually everything here leads back to the vine.
Thousands of years ago, people stood on these hills, harvested grapes and carried them to presses cut into limestone. Today’s winemakers have stainless steel, laboratories, French oak and knowledge gathered from the world’s great wine regions.
The techniques have changed almost beyond recognition.
The land has not.
Perhaps that is why the revival of the Judean Hills feels so resonant. Israel is full of ancient things made new again: a language revived, agriculture returned to abandoned terraces, traditions carried across continents and generations and planted again in their original soil.
Wine belongs to that story too.
You can drink excellent wine almost anywhere in the world. Here, you can stand on an ancient terrace, looking across the hills of Judah towards Jerusalem, with a glass made from grapes grown in the same earth cultivated by people thousands of years before you.
The vines, like so much else, have come home.
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