Description

This is the miraculous story of our award-winning Argaman wine. It all began about a decade ago when Jacob Ner David and Yehuda Nahar , the founders of Jezreel Valley Winery, had a dream. A dream of creating the ultimate Israeli wine. The only thing was that up to then, no one could truly define what ‘Israeli wine’ actually was. To Nahar and Ner-David it was only natural to make wine from the one variety of grapes grown exclusively in Israel – Argaman. Due to the fact that the premium wine industry in Israel had completely overlooked this variety, At Jezreel they began creating on a trial-and-error basis, year after year. All while learning about this special variety as they went : controlling the level of astringency, the acidity levels, and more (ohh…so much more). The miracle happened in the third harvest. The sequence of days from weekend to the Rosh Hashanah holiday meant that two small containers of grapes were left in the barrel room without treatment like the others.

After the holiday, the winemakers proceeded with trepidation to taste the wine and an instant chill hit themus – the wine was PERFECT! As it turned out, all it took was a little (ok, a lot of) determination and perseverance on the part of Jezreel’s winemakers while the wine just needed to let its natural talent reveal itself. Earlier this year Jezreel received a message from DECANTER magazine notifying us that Jezreel Argaman 2017 won the gold medal at the Decanter World Wine Awards, one of the the most important wine competitions in the world, scoring the highest points for an Israeli wine. Each variety has its origin, but few originate from Israel. Argaman is an Israeli variety, cultivated in the 70s, a cross between Carignan and Souzao. The goal was to create something truly unique to the local scene, something precisely suitable to the climate and soils. Despite its perfect Israeli character, Argaman spent most of its life ‘underground’, yet to be discovered by Israeli winemakers.