Resilience in a Bottle: 5,000 years of Palestinian wine
The following was originally published in the print and digital Deluxe Food Edition. Order a print or digital copy to support the only Palestinian magazine in the United States.
This essay starts with a confession. In late 2000, I was asked to write Food & Wine magazine’s then-annual “Wine Guide.” As I drew my editorial map of the world’s wine regions, I insisted to my editors that I include a chapter about the Middle East and the Caucasus region. As with other parts of the world, I provided background information about countries whose wine was available in the U.S.: Lebanon, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, and unavoidably, Israel. Palestine, whose wine wasn’t then imported, was excluded. Not satisfied with this absence, I asked a friend coming from Bethlehem to New York to “import” a bottle by Cremisan — Palestine’s oldest winery. She stopped in England along the way, and, meeting a friend at the Tower of London, checked the small bag containing the wine at security, then forgot to collect it after leaving.
I was upset to not have the bottle, but I decided to do something I had never done before or since: Write a note about a wine I didn’t taste.
The review was generic – nothing that couldn’t apply to most dry white wines. Practically speaking, the details were beside the point. While there was something poignant about the story of a Palestinian wine held captive in what was once one of the world’s most famous prisons, asserting the presence of Palestine — one of the world’s oldest wine-producing lands — was a far more important one to tell.
Many are surprised that wine is even possible in Palestine, based on the erroneous belief that the climate is too hot (never mind that the weather is comparable to much of Italy), or that it is forbidden for religious reasons (Palestine’s Christian community is the world’s oldest and a vibrant part of Palestinian society). In fact, Palestinian wine production dates back over 5,000 years, from the Canaanite era to the present, and every period in between: Philistine, Hebrew, Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Frank, Ottomans, and others.
During Byzantine times and again during the Crusades, sweet wines from the hinterlands of Gaza and Majdal/Ashqlan were prized in Europe and by pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. And while customary Muslim practice eschewed the consumption of alcohol, wine production was maintained by and for local Christian and Jewish communities.
Taking advantage of the flow of visitors to Palestine and seeking a way to support monastery-run orphanages, a Salesian monk from Italy established the Cremisan winery in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, in 1885. Five years later, the Latroun Winery was founded by French Trappist monks. Also present were small-scale, very local operations that largely didn’t survive the Nakba.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that the largely somnambulant Palestinian wine industry began stirring outside the confines of the church, first with Cantina di Cana in the Galilee, followed by others nearby, notably, Julia, Jascara, and Ashkar, and in the West Bank, Domaine Kassis (2004), Taybeh (2013), Philokalia (2015), as well as smaller wineries that have not yet established a presence outside Palestine. At present, there are 11 wineries on both sides of the 1949 Green Line run by winemakers who self-identify as Palestinian.
The question of identity is fundamental to the idea of “Palestinian” wine. Intuitively speaking, wine made by Palestinians from grapes grown in Palestine constitutes Palestinian wine. Yet, politics often defy what seems natural. Wines from the Galilee, by international trade convention, are inevitably labeled “Made in Israel.” Those made in the West Bank fall into a gray zone, especially when exported with “Palestine,” which is not a full member of the World Trade Organization or recognized as a state by many countries. Wines coming to the U.S., therefore, must legally be labeled “West Bank,” though there is some room for improvisation: Taybeh Winery clearly prints “Palestine” on their label; Philokalia, “Palestinian Territories.” Cremisan, run by Roman Catholic monks who wish to avoid controversy, is labeled “Bethlehem, Holyland.”
Despite the Salesian brother’s reluctance to engage in politics, it can be convincingly argued that Cremisan’s winemaker, Fadi Batarseh, is the man most responsible for raising the distinctive profile of Palestinian wine. His thesis at the University of Udine in Italy was the first comprehensive study to identify by genotype Indigenous Palestinian grape varieties: 21 in all. Of those, four to eight have been deemed especially suitable to make wine (opinions differ): Hamdani (aka Marawi), Jandali, Dabouki (aka Zeini), for whites; Baladi Asmar, Baluti, Bittuni, Shayukhi for reds. The others are regarded better for eating than drinking.
Based on genetic markers, these varieties likely have existed for generations, millennia, even. As with so many things in Palestine, Israelis have claimed them as their own, asserting that they are what slaked the thirst of King David three millennia ago (and, inconveniently for Zionist mythology, what the Canaanites harvested before the Hebrew arrival in the purported Promised Land). A handful of Israeli wineries have planted them in recent years, but these varieties are grown almost exclusively by Palestinian farmers in the vinous heartland between Bethlehem and Hebron in the West Bank. While records are scant, most of their vines are thought to be 60 to over 100 years old — some predating the Nakba of 1948, others, the Naksa of 1967. And, when Israeli wineries want to make top-quality wine from varieties they claim as their own, harvested from generations-old vines, they inevitably source them from Palestinians.
Despite the seemingly obvious advantage of making wine from Indigenous grapes, most Palestinian wine today is made from so-called international varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay. Phylloxera, a vine pest endemic to North America that destroyed most of France’s vineyards in the late 19th century, finally made its dangers known to Palestine in the 1980s. Within a decade, vineyards that withered in the insect’s presence had to be replanted with vine cuttings grafted onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks. International trends at the time were to plant these same varieties, which commanded higher prices and were more marketable to status-conscious customers than less-appreciated local ones. Overwhelmingly, wines made today in the Galilee, as well as most in the West Bank, are based on varieties now found in much of the winemaking world. Yet, Nemi Ashkar, winemaker for his eponymous family winery, asserts that Palestinian wines still take on a quality that could only come from there.
Producing distinctively Palestinian wine, of course, is more complicated than the variety of grape used. The colonial apparatus of the Israeli state — with its checkpoints, closures, and curfews, plus the calculated vandalism and violence Israeli settlers have always inflicted — made things difficult. Following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, the situation has become even more dire.
“Settlers, who are given military-grade weapons for reserve duty but aren’t deployed to Gaza, take it out on us,” said Nader Muaddi, who makes wine that he distills for arak. “Grape vines [are being] chopped, burned, and uprooted.”
The grape harvest in 2023 had just finished by Oct. 7 and was reportedly terrific in terms of quality and volume. This year was entirely different, with a greatly reduced crop, largely because farmers, fearing attacks by settlers, only visited their vineyards on Saturday (Shabbat) or Jewish holidays, when they knew settlers would remain at home. Vines require properly-timed work: Pruning, tilling, composting, spraying, harvesting at specific times. If the work can’t be done, grape yields and quality suffer, as it did in 2024.
In some ways, this smaller crop might have been a blessing given the profound economic crisis affecting the West Bank. Since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 through to the present genocide in Gaza, tourism has collapsed. There are few visitors to wineries or bottles consumed in restaurants. Salaries paid by the Palestine National Authority have been cut, leaving little discretionary income for locals to spend. Weddings, festivals, and other celebrations have been reduced or canceled because of the economy and the profound sense of loss and national mourning.
Exports, an essential part of many wineries’ business plans, have, since Oct. 7, become increasingly difficult and expensive. Taybeh’s winemaker Canaan Khoury reports that it now costs more to get bottles from the winery to a ship at Ashdod, 100 kilometers away, than from the port to Japan, on account of permits, checkpoints, multiple restrictions, capricious and changing regulations, and extra time and labor. The same logistical pressures affect producers shipping from other ports, too. Until the recent ceasefire between Hezbollah and the Israelis, those going through Haifa also had to contend with exorbitant insurance costs and delays due to the threat of rocket fire from Lebanon.
Yet, Palestinian winemakers remain resilient. Farmers farm, vintners make wine. While some made considerably less wine this year than last (Cremisan reported production is 15% of usual), one, Taybeh, made more.
“Red wines take three years [to reach the market]. We expect things to change by then,” said Khoury. And, he says they’ll plan to plant more vines this February.
Two decades after I first wrote about them, the story of Palestinian wines is entirely different — and one that is told in mainstream publications, including The New York Times, Wine Spectator, and others. Cremisan has moved from a dungeon in the Tower of London to wine lists around the U.S. It has been joined by others: Philokalia, Taybeh, Ashkar, Julia, and Latroun. And as with explicitly Palestinian restaurants opening in various cities (Ayat and Qanoon in New York, Al-Basha in Patterson, NJ, Reem’s California and Old Jerusalem in San Francisco, Baba’s Pantry in Kansas City, Shababi and Albi in D.C.) wine shops and restaurants are highlighting “Palestine” and “Palestinian” as the reference point.
No doubt, many consumers of these wines in the U.S. do so because of solidarity. Jason Bajalia, whose company Terra Sancta imports to the U.S. all the brands previously mentioned except for Taybeh (which is self-imported), said that following Oct. 7, there were a number of large purchases for benefit events. Those have largely flattened, but interest remains high.
Jeremy Block, owner of Some Good Wine in New York — the retailer with the greatest online presence in the U.S. for Cremisan — said that his best customers are evangelical Christians, to whom he ships the wine all over the country. “They visit the Holy Land, they taste the wine, and they want to support it,” Block said. “It’s very simple.”
As vines age, their roots go deep, extracting life energy from seemingly barren soils and most minute fissures in otherwise solid rocks, clutching the earth with passion and purpose. Perhaps Palestine’s most celebrated winemaker these days, Philokalia’s Sari Khoury, makes a wine from vines that were bulldozed for the construction of an Israeli settler road. After a time, the vines — ancient, Indigenous varieties — found their way, sideways, to the sun, through an outcropping of boulders, bringing forth the golden grapes that go into his distinctive, sole white wine: Grapes of Wrath. Fermented in amphoras without additions, the wine speaks of earth and sun, pleasure and pain, tenacity and hope — a distinctly Palestinian wine.
