Margalit Winery

Winery

60 HaTahana Street, Binyamina-Giv'at Ada

A small family winery on HaTahana Street that grows its own grapes and makes about 30,000 bottles a year, open to visitors by appointment

Margalit Winery is a small family winery founded in 1989 in Kfar Bilu near Rehovot; it moved to an orchard near Hadera in 1994 and has been in Binyamina since 2013. Its site says it was the first small commercial winery in an industry then held by large, long-established wineries, and that its first wine on sale was a Cabernet Sauvignon of the 1989 vintage. It grows its own grapes in vineyards in the Galilee and in Binyamina, planted ten years after it opened, and in Zichron Ya'akov since 2011, and has grown from 900 bottles in its first year to about 30,000. Dr. Yair Margalit, a former physical chemist who teaches wine chemistry and technology at the Technion and has written textbooks used in wine studies, turned to growing grapes and making wine; his son Assaf, who trained in California, has since taken over from him as winemaker. Visits are by appointment and paid, and much of each new vintage is sold at the winery over three weekends of tastings in March or April, before Passover.