Fruit of the Land

This really isn’t about the wine. It’s more about the land and the grapevines that grow on the land and the 400 or so families that have come back to Har Bracha (Photos: Eli Segal)

N ir Lavi the winemaker and founder of Har Bracha Winery jumps out of his seat and walks to a window at the back of his tasting room.

“Do you see that?” he says pointing to a mountain range in the far distance. “That’s Harei Gilad ” in Jordan he says. He takes a few steps forward and now standing in the middle of the room faces west. “From here you can see from Netanya to Herzliya and facing this direction ” he says pivoting south “you can see all the way to Jerusalem. But we didn’t know all of that when we came up here. All we knew was that we wanted to settle the land.”

We’re sitting in a wood-paneled wine-tasting room/restaurant in the settlement of Har Bracha 870 meters (almost 3 000 feet) above sea level and about 800 meters as the crow flies from Shechem.