This holiday we are recommending three wines, all from our reasonably priced D series; they are the new vintages (2009) of our Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and Fumé Blanc.

I am in New York for a gala Israeli wine tasting, my impressions of the event were very mixed.

We couldn’t have asked for better if we had tried. On Monday evening, 23 Feb, Channel 2 television’s Tochnit Hisachon aired a piece about the best places to buy wines. Their roving reporter Menachem Horowitz wandered around the streets and supermarkets asking people where they buy their wines. Many people felt that the best place was their local supermarket until Horowitz proved that prices can differ as much as 30% between supermarkets. Anyway for Dalton the star of the piece was the young man (Eyal Hazan) who said that while he usually shops for wine at his supermarket, if he is in the north he buys Dalton directly from the winery. Thank you Eyal for those kind words. By the way, Dalton wines are not available in the big supermarket chains in Israel.

So, John arrived on Sunday evening for a couple of days of tasting and blending. Our objective on this visit was to see how the white blends we made in November were fairing and to judge and classify all the red wines that hadn’t gone into the Canaan blend in November.

I stoped off in London to participate in a portfolio tasting for my UK importer Kedem Europe.