After our city fix, we head north, past fields of soybeans and bananas and grapes, beyond dunes and grazing sheep and an aqueduct built in Herodian times. The hillsides are draped with Arab villages, distinguished from a distance by minarets and rebar poking from unfinished upper floors. As each family gets more money, I'm told, it builds an upper story for the next generation.

Down a winding wooded lane we come to Amphorae, one of the best of the boutique wineries that have sprung up here in the past decade.

"When we moved here, I was going to import French wine," recalls Arison. "I wasn't going to serve that icky sweet wine I had been served when I visited for 22 years."

But Israel is no longer the locus of Kool-Aid reds. During our week, we'll taste wines from a half-dozen top Israeli wineries; each has me scrambling to figure out which are sold in the U.S. and how many bottles of the others I can safely cram into my suitcase.

Amphorae's Gil Shatzberg is rated among the country's top young winemakers. Trained at University of California's Davis campus - the intellectual center of the modern wine world - and in other Israeli wineries, Shatzberg and partners released their first Amphorae vintage in 2000. He's looking to make wines that are distinctly Israeli, designed to complement local ingredients without getting overpowered by the local spices.

We try the `05 chardonnay; this is not oaky or buttery but something altogether lighter, crisper, more ethereal. The `03 cabernet is woodsy and dry, hinting at coffee and chocolate. Not his ultimate wines, he said, "but we're getting there."

Like all farmers, winemakers wage a nonstop battle against unpredictable elements and pestilence, and here, high sugar contents created by a surfeit of sun. But last year brought a distinctly Israeli challenge. Shatzberg's vineyards are located in the country's north, near the Lebanese border. When fighting broke out last July, the vineyards were trampled by tanks and ravaged by local pigs. By the time the war ended in late summer, more than 40 percent of his crop was gone.

"We're calling the `06 release the Grape of Wrath," he said. "To be a farmer, you have to be stubborn."

Israeli winemakers face another unique challenge, I learn during our week when we visit two other top wineries, Golan Heights and Castel. Should they go kosher?

Getting a "kosher" designation requires fulfillment of strict growing and production practices. The most difficult of these, I'm told, revolves around the handling of the wine itself. Only Sabbath-observant Jews can handle the wine from the time it is pressed until after it is bottled. Unless the winemaker is observant, he or she can't even tap the barrel for tastings during maturation - both a frustration and an expense. (Israeli wines often cost more than similar-quality wines produced elsewhere.)

Then there are marketing issues. When wine is shipped abroad, being kosher evokes images of sugary sweetness. But though only about 30 percent of Israel's population keeps kosher, nonkosher wines aren't served at events and even in many restaurants, for fear of offending observant Jews. Bottles can't even be served by nonobservant catering staffs.

Ironic. "Wine is supposed to bring people together," said one vintner.

Though wine has been made in Israel since Biblical times, it got a jump start in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when 52 Jewish families from Romania and Russia established settlements near today's town of Zichron Ya'akov. The Promised Land proved harshly unpromising; land billed as rich and fertile turned out to be barren and swampy. Malaria threatened will and survival. Dozens of babies were buried before they even earned names.