Welcome to the new look Dalton website. Over the past few years the Internet has developed from a one-way informative tool to more of a communal and collaborative tool and I wanted to build a new site that incorporated the old and the new.

The topic of corks and closures in the wine industry is a fairly contentious issue. After having attended a symosium on the subject, I felt the need to put my thoughts down from the point of view of a producer, marketer and consumer of wines.

Our long-term plan is to grow the winery to a production of about 1500 tonnes, which roughly translates to 1.5 million bottles. In order to make the numbers we are planting new vineyards at quite a rapid rate. Yesterday I visited some of our new plots to see how we are progressing. I was really impressed with what we have accomplished.

I would just like to officially welcome some new members of staff.

A couple of weeks ago someone decided to plant some hostile software (malware) into our website. Surfers using Explorer who had a decent anti-virus were sent away and Google blocked access to the site to users of Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers. Firstly, I’d like to apologise about the disruption to the service. Sod’s Law (Murphy’s English cousin), of course, dictated that the problems surfaced on a Friday night. Once we discovered that we had a problem we moved as quickly as possible to fix it. This entailed a lot of messing about with the site, including rebuilding it. The malware has been removed and the site is clean. But all the recent work has meant that the site has been quite buggy lately. It also meant that we couldn’t put up new postings over the past two weeks.

Next Friday is Shavuot, a festival that celebrates both the harvesting of the first fruit and the giving of the Torah to the Jewish People. Traditionally on Shavuot we eat dairy products, which is too bad for any one with high cholesterol. In celebration of Shavuot the winery will host its visitors to a broad tasting of cheeses made from sheep and goats milk and we will be offering wines to taste to pair with the chesses and dairy dishes in general, particularly all our new white wines, the Fumé Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc Reserve, Chardonnay Reserve and the Rosé. The tasting will be held at the winery visitors’ center on Thursday from 10:00am – 4:00pm. There is no need to book in advance.

We had the pleasure of the self-professed curmudgeon and wine writer Daniel Rogov at the winery on Monday. It was a long day, I picked Rogov up from his home in Tel Aviv and we made our way up to the winery. On the trip up we chatted about all sorts of topics ranging from his new book on kosher wines to the future of the middle-east.

I have just returned from London after having spent the week judging at the International Wine Challenge together with Naama and several hundred other judges. We were incredibly lucky to have been invited to judge here as it is one of the most prestigious wine competitions in the UK if not the world. About 10,000 wines were submitted to the competition which had to be judged and scored in the space of two weeks. If you do the maths this means that about 1000 wines have to be tasted a day.