Israeli wine – we knew it was good did we realise it was this good?!

Let us begin with a fact that will cause any self-important Parisian sommelier to spill his Burgundy: at a time when the Burgundians were still arguing about which muddy patch of field deserved to be called a Grand Cru, the Nabataeans were already producing wine – in the middle of a desert.

The Nabataeans – traders, city-builders and camel enthusiasts who gave us the rose-red city of Petra – arrived in the Negev somewhere between the 3rd century BCE and the 4th century CE. And in a true display of chutzpah they looked at a landscape receiving roughly 100 millimetres of rain per year and thought: grapes.

With a feat of hydraulic engineering, they carved the hillsides of the Negev into elaborate terraced fields – limans – ringed with low stone walls that caught every last drop of rainfall, channelled it precisely where it was needed, and stored the surplus in rock-hewn cisterns carved by hand. Some 600,000 dunams of terraced agricultural land.

Around cities such as Oboda (Avdat), Mamshit, Shivta and Nitzana, entire vineyards flourished. Archaeologists have since unearthed wine presses and production facilities – storage vats, drainage systems, tennis-court sized pressing floors. Negev wine was shipped across the Roman and Byzantine world.

Under Byzantine rule, from the 4th to the 7th century, the enterprise continued to flourish but then came the Arab-Muslim conquest of the 7th century and the vines made way for other priorities. The Negev retired from the wine business for approximately 1,300 years.

Fast forward to 1948. The State of Israel is established, and the Negev becomes National Project Number One – “to make the desert bloom”, as David Ben-Gurion famously insisted, having moved himself to Kibbutz Sde Boker to prove the point.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, serious agricultural experiments with wine grapes began in the Negev – particularly in the highland areas around Ramat HaNegev and Mitzpe Ramon, at elevations of 600 to 900 metres above sea level. And it gets interesting, because this is not your average scorched desert. These are cold desert highlands, with dramatic temperature swings between day and night that force the grapes to develop remarkable acidity and aromatic complexity.

In 1998, Yatir Winery was established – a partnership between Carmel Winery and local communities in the northern Negev, near the Yatir Forest. Carmey Avdat – named after the ancient Nabataean city of Oboda – went one better: a near-literal reconstruction of a Nabataean vineyard on its original ancient site. Others followed: Ramat HaNegev Winery, Noa’t Smadar, Anoush, Sipurei Eretz and more – a community of winemakers, some kibbutz-born, some immigrants.

So here we are in 2026, and the Negev has been internationally recognised with a protected Geographical Indication (GI), placing this remarkable region formally on the world wine map alongside Bordeaux, Tuscany and Napa Valley. A GI defines geographical boundaries, production rules and quality standards, and gives the wineries of the Negev the right to appear on a bottle with the name of a place that has genuine identity, genuine character, genuine pedigree.

When a sommelier in Tokyo, New York or Milan brings a bottle bearing the word “Negev” at the table, he is presenting 2,000 years of history: Nabataean hydraulic genius, a desert that bloomed, slept and bloomed again, and a handful of people who decided that what once was could be again – only this time with better equipment and internationally-recognised credentials.

Tal Sunderland-Cohen is Chairman of the Wine Guild of The United Kingdom, a member of The Circle of Wine Writers and Honorary president of Chaine des Rotisseurs