Sunday, Sept 30th.  We loved the wine (Odem Mountain Winery Volcanic Cabernet Sauvignon 2008)  so much at dinner last night that today we drove to the Golan Heights to visit Odem Mountain Winery. The owner was a very nice guy and who knew a lot about wine. We bought another case of wine!  I hope we can bring some of it back with us.

Marty with Yishay Alfasi. Yishay owns Odem Mountain Winery along with his father and brother. Their flagship wine carries the Alfasi label.)

After driving around the Golan Heights, we also drove to a Druze village (Majdal Shams).  The city is right near the Syrian border and the inhabitants are considered Syrian citizens by the Syrian authorities. Syrian universities are open to them free of charge.  They are also considered permanent residents by Israel and could elect to become citizens although only ~10% have done so, but all can travel freely through the county and study at Israeli universities. Israeli state services are freely available to them such as the Kupat Holim health insurance.

After Majdal Shams, we drove back to Sfat in the Galilee where we briefly checked out the artist colony high on the mountain.  We didn’t have much time as everything was closing for Sukkot so we’ll have to go back.  You can check out more details on Sfat here.  As with most phonetic translations of Hebrew names, there are various spellings of Sfat, i.e. Safed, Tzfat, Safat, etc.