Clos de Gat

The name is in two languages and only explains itself once you reach the estate. Clos is the French term for an enclosed vineyard; gat is the Hebrew word for wine press. And there is a real one: beside the house, in the middle of the vines, stands a gat cut into the rock that predates the Roman period by about a thousand years. Three thousand years old, on the spot where wine is still made today.

The winery lies in the foothills of the Judean mountains, on the edge of the Ayalon Valley of biblical accounts. In 1998 winemaker Eyal Rotem partnered with Kibbutz Harel and began planting vines and building a winery on the land surrounding his house. That is where the Har'El range takes its name.

There are nineteen hectares on a thin layer of topsoil resting directly on limestone bedrock, and a small output of around five thousand cases.