The New York Times has an article about a Palestinian Christian winemaker who waxes poetic about the long history of Palestinian wines.
Sari Khoury, the proprietor of Philokalia in the West Bank, would prefer to speak of the craft of winemaking and the ancient winemaking history of Palestinians rather than of the precarious circumstances he must currently navigate simply to get his work done.Mr. Khoury was one of the very few winemakers working in the region before the Oct. 7 attacks on Israelis by Hamas and the subsequent war in Gaza, about 45 miles to the southwest. And his work, creating excellent natural wines, has continued through the war.Winemaking is not widely practiced today in the West Bank, though Mr. Khoury cited one other producer near Bethlehem, Cremisan Winery, which has been making wine since 1885 and is run by the Salesians of St. John Bosco, a Roman Catholic order.
“After recognizing those grapes, I wanted to make a wine that would celebrate 10,000 years of wine history,” he said. “I wanted to plant these native varieties in one plot.”
There are actually a lot of wineries in the West Bank that are unmentioned in this article, that have been making award-winning wines for longer than Mr. Khoury has.
KosherWines.com lists 50 different wines from the region.
They just happen to be owned by Jews, and are therefore excluded from being even mentioned by the newspaper of record.
Before 1948, when anyone talked about Palestine wines, they almost always were referring to Jewish owned wines.
When the Cremisan Winery mentioned was created in 1885, by a cleric to employ poor Christians, there was already a thriving Carmel wine business. Interestingly, the Cremisan website says "Today the area of Cremisan is acknowledged as one of the most beautiful localities in Judea."
Of course, Jews had been making wine in the region way before the 19th century. Archaeologists have unearthed winepresses and equipment from the First Temple period. Wine is mentioned prominently in the Hebrew scriptures and Talmud.
The New York Times itself in 2015 wrote about how Israelis were using ancient grape DNA to recreate wines as they were in Biblical times.
That article also mentions that some Israeli wineries purchase grapes from Palestinian Arab vineyards but everything must be done secretly - not only because they are selling to Jews but because there would be backlash from Muslims who don't want to see any alcohol sold in "Palestine." (There are lots of products of vineyards that Muslims can consume, like grape leaves and grapes themselves.)
It also noted that winemaking was banned by Muslim authorities in Palestine for many centuries, with the Ottoman Empire only allowing the Christian and Jewish communities to restart it in the 19th century.
It is more than curious that an article that talks about the history of winemaking in the region excludes Jews as well as the Muslim antipathy towards wine.
It is also hard not to notice that while the 2015 article about Jews making wine takes pains to also speak to Palestinians who have a tiny wine industry in comparison, this article about a Palestinian winemaker is not at all keen on evenhandedness.
Not to mention that the original Christians in the Holy Land were converts from Judaism.
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While I was researching this, I found an interesting example of fake news from the mid-1800s.
There are a number of articles from then arguing whether King David or Jesus drank fermented or unfermented Palestinian wine.
At that time a temperance movement arose attempting to ban all alcoholic beverages, and the Christians behind it tried to claim that the wine mentioned in the Bible was actually unfermented grape juice, which is absurd - there are plenty of Biblical verses that mention or allude to wine's intoxicating effects. (One of the leaders of the temperance movement was Dr. Thomas Welch, who founded Welch's Grape Juice specifically to make a pasteurized product that does not ferment over time.)
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