Much as I love the city, there are times when I've just got to get out of town, crank up my summer songs playlist and hit the road.
About a week ago I went with my best friends, themselves career women, to visit Domaine du Castel – an estate winery ten miles west of Jerusalem in the Judean Hills. It's a pastoral location where the vines are in a tightly spaced planting grid designed to keep yields low and quality high. To produce wine of a high quality they only use the best French oak barriques from the forests of Central France.
After a short tour of the winery, we settled down to the business of wine tasting. The wines were elegant and classic, like Chardonnay which was full and round with plenty of yellow tropical fruit and roasted almonds. We also tasted red wines – "Castel Grand Vine" (a blend consisting mainly Cabernet Sauvignon with Merlot and a touch of Petit Verdot) and "Petit Castel" (bland of Merlot with an addition of Cabernet Sauvignon).
It was fun!
