Winery MeisharGoliath

Today’s high-tech vintners of Israel’s Negev desert grow modern grape varieties like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, but a new study shows the region’s desolate sand was once home to very different cultivars – relics notable for past and future alike. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study compared the genetic information of a handful of grape pips from an excavated Byzantine monastery with hundreds of modern cultivars, and wild and table grapes from Israel ...

Personality. I can think of few parts of the world of wine that possess as much of it, alongside individuality, as Israel. Its story needs to be heard. Wine has been central to this land since before it was even Israel, and Judaism celebrates with wine for much of its ritual. Modern Israeli wine was born in the 1880s when Baron Edmond de Rothschild introduced mainly Bordeaux varieties to the region. Ambitious planting programmes took place a century later, and many Israelis studied winemaking ab ...

The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C  in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...