Friday, September 7, 2012.  Jerusalem is a major metropolis, both ancient and modern, nestled among the Judean Hills. This area has been the site and source of many struggles and wars. The Israelites and Philistines fought here many generations ago. It is also the place where battles related to the Israeli war of independence occurred in 1948. The landscape is striking; a mixture of rugged hills with forests, desert, and settlements.

The Judean Hills               

A settlement in the hills

Our first stop on our exploration of the Judean Hills was the Domaine du Castel winery in the village of Ramat Reizel. Here all the streets signs are in Hebrew and the tour book did not give a street address. Ruth, the tour guide asked us to call her on her cell when we were close. That we did. She gave us directions as we were driving – “go down the street and look for a bus stop; keep to the right and look for a flag; turn right after 50 meters onto a dirt road; take the dirt road to the end.”  Things are definitely not easy to find in Israel – exacerbated because neither of us read Hebrew.

On the way to the winery in Ramat Reizel

Outside the Domaine de Castel winery

The owner of Domaine du Castel has been making wines since 1995. He started as a chef in Tel Aviv, and then ran Mama Mia, a pretty well-known Italian restaurant in Jerusalem. He started the winery to have a good local wine to serve to his customers. When it became too difficult to keep the restaurant open because of the Intifada in the early 2000s, he turned to wine making full-time. He is completely self-taught. Now, he makes several thousand bottles of fabulous whites and reds per year. In the last few years, his winery has achieved “kosher” status –meaning that only religious Jews handle the wine – as a non-observant, the owner instructs, but no longer handles his own wine! After a brief tour of the cellars, we had a tasting of the wines. It’s not like tastings in the U.S. You sit at a table with three bottles of wine, a plate of cheeses (soft, semi-soft and hard) and a basket of bread. It’s a meal – and we pretty much finished two bottles. The wines and cheeses were terrific, as was the ambience. Yes, we bought a case, which turns out to be the most expensive wines we ever owned.

 Domaine du Castel wine cellar

The owners private collection