I am finally back to Chicago and it feels great to be home! My trip back home was not the most pleasant. I had a 5 hour flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. I then had to deal with the French Arrogant staff. I apologize to anyone from France that is reading this blog, but seriously can they be a little bit more pleasant? I was lucky enough to have a 10 hour layover in Paris before my Chicago flight. Total travel time: 24 hours.
I have been to Israel many times to visit wineries, but this was my first trip that was planned completely by me, exclusively to visit wineries. I learned that it isn't very easy to plan a trip like this, especially because I didn't know where the wineries were located and how to group them together. Luckily I had Oded Shoham help me and a few wineries were also helpful. From this experience I have decided to create a new project on mykerem - map out all of the Israeli wineries so we can all easily find where each winery is located. This won't be an easy project, it will probably take about 3 months to finish.
I also learned that 3 wineries is the absolute maximum anyone should ever attempt in one day. But to get the most out of your winery visits, you should really only visit two wineries. On Thursday I visited 4 wineries: Flam, Ella Valley, Katlav and Castel. I started at 9am and didn't get back to my hotel until 7pm. I was in such a rush to go from one winery to the next that I never felt relaxed and in the moment. The worst is that because I was in such a rush I never had a chance to write a few notes and I forgot much of what was discussed. On a positive note, the driver that I hired for the day had such a great time he decided that the next weekend he would take his girlfriend on the same wine route.
This trip opened my eyes to how large the Israeli wine industry is. I spent 5 days doing nothing but visiting wineries and I was only able to cover 10 out of some 200 wineries in Israel. Whats even more impressive is that all of the wineries claim to sell out of their wines every year. How is that possible?? I am not saying I don't believe them, but lets put this into perspective. All of the wineries sell a majority of their wines in Israel. If 10 years ago there was 30 wineries and today 200, are Israeli's really drinking 7 times as much as they used to? Also consider the price points of most of these wines, they are around $15- $20 per bottle. Israeli's are known for thinking big and being over confident, but lets be honest, not every wine needs to be over $20 per bottle. To be fair the larger wineries are producing some value wines including Binyamina, Golan Heights Winery, Tishbi and Barkan.
One thing is for sure, the Israeli economy is very strong. Every restaurant I went to was packed, and traffic was horrible. They are building like crazy, new roads, bridges, condo buildings, and office buildings. I was told that even with the explosive growth of residential buildings, there is still a shortage of apartments. Israel is an amazing place to visit and I would highly recommend everyone to go see how far the country has come in its short 60 years of life. It was weird to feel like America was lagging behind Israel in many ways.
Everyone speaks English (except for cab drivers), the beaches are beautiful (including the people), mass transit is amazing (the trains are super clean), and there is so much to see and do. I can't wait to go back!
Later I will be posting some pictures from my travels that I didn't have time to post while I was there.


To view my Tuesday blog click here.
To view my Wednesday blog click here.
To view my Thursday blog click here.
To view my Friday blog click here.
To view my Saturday blog click here.