It’s funny. I live in Beit Shemesh, which is about 35 minutes from Jerusalem and 45 minutes from Tel Aviv. By far the closest winery to me geographically is Teperberg – which is only a 6 minute drive (beating out Tzora, which is about 8 minutes away). But, I haven’t been there to taste wine ever. Why? There are two reasons. First, they have no tasting room and no easy way to really host anyone who came to taste. This will change in the very near future, as I am told that they are very close to finishing a formal visitor’s center and tasting room, which should make tasting at the winery an enjoyable experience.

The second reason I haven’t really visited is that, quite frankly, for the last 10 years or so the winery made a conscious shift in style, in what I assume was a push to increase sales. And while that was very much successful – Teperberg is now Israel’s third largest winery, producing about 10 million bottles of wines per year – the style really didn’t appeal to me.  That is not a commentary on the winemaking. All the wines at Teperberg over the years have been professionally made by three excellent winemakers, Shiki Rauchberger, Olivier Fratty, and Dani Friedenberg.

Luckily, that has changed somewhat. As I noted previously, in 2019 Dani Friedenberg started producing his own wines through the winery. In 2019 and 2020, he produced two wines, a Granache and a Ramato, which is a Pinot Gris made using skin maceration. While I reviewed the 2019 wines, I never got around to tasting the 2020 vintage on release – though I will be correcting that in this post, as Dani invited me to the winery to taste through his new releases as well as few standard Teperberg releases. For 2021, Dani is adding a Barbera to his lineup, which is exactly what I am looking for in an Israeli wine – and quite frankly, the regular Teperberg wines that we tasted were all very nice as well.

As a bonus, at a meeting of a wine tasting group that I belong to where we taste many current releases all blind, I tasted a new wine by Olivier Fratty, the second winemaker at Teperberg. As opposed to Dani, Olivier’s wines are his own private label and not being sold through Teperberg – but I figured it would be nice to include notes on those as well, as it really does show that the team at Teperberg is capable of producing some really nice wines!

Anyhow – enough talking – here are the wines I tasted: