By Ada Brunstein

On a frigid February night in downtown Boston, 200 people gathered at the Bulthaup Showroom to sample wines from a region that rarely sees snow.

It’s also a region that, according to wine importer Richard Shaffer, is a hidden treasure of the wine world.

Israel.

This was the second wine tasting to be sponsored by the Israeli Consulate of New England in an effort to reveal Israel’s ample offerings.

Shaffer, who runs Israeli Wine Direct LLC, helped organize the evening, and in his introductory comments he revealed not only his love of wine, but his passion for Israel (both of which seemed to be shared by many in the room).

“What you’re drinking now is the future of wine history,” he said. The wine world, he believes, is about to discover the gems produced by the untapped Mediterranean vineyards in hills of Judea, the Galilee, Samson, the Negev, and Shomron.

“But why should we care about Israeli wines?” Shaffer asked.

For starters, “wine was born there.” (Not in Napa, he adds). “The first thing Noah did when he got off the ark was to plant a vineyard.”

When I got home that night I checked Shaffer’s statement against the bible I received for my bat-mitzvah 26 years ago. Here, in a nutshell, is what happened:

God was alarmed by how His creation project went awry; man, as it turned out, was irredeemably wicked.

So God tore it all down … Well, almost all. He took a liking to Noah so He asked him to load an ark with his family and two of every creature. Then He started the rains, which lasted 40 days and 40 nights but the floodwaters lingered for about 10 months.

After almost a year in the ark, and with a mission to repopulate the earth, Noah built an altar for God and offered up a carnivore’s delight of sacrificial meats – burnt offerings of beasts and fowl. In other words, he made God a nice dinner.

God smelled the sumptuous meal (my translation says “and the Lord smelled the sweet savour”) and promptly swore never to flood the earth again. It seems the way to God’s heart is through His stomach.

Then Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk and got naked, all within a span of two or three short sentences.

But the history of wine in Israel wasn’t as easy as Noah would have us think.

Up until the early 600s Israeli wine wasn’t much to write home about; it had to be seasoned with spices in order to be palatable. After the Muslim conquest in the early 7th century, wine production was banned altogether and the vineyards were destroyed. For the next 1200 years or so Israel was “dry.”

In the late 1800s, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, who owned Bordeaux Château Lafite-Rothschild, revived the Israeli wine industry by building wineries and supporting local efforts to grow the business.

Though the industry survived, it didn’t really thrive. The wines were thought to be too thick and sweet. But in the 1980s, with the emergence of boutique wineries throughout the country, Israeli wines began to part ways with their bad reputation, and today, with roughly 150-200 wineries and centuries worth of experience, Israeli wines can go head to head with some of the world’s best.

The wines I sampled last Wednesday evening at Bulthaup were definitely not your mother’s Manishevitz. They were characterized by spice, some occasional hints of chocolate and honey and, as Shaffer put it, “a sort of sunshine.”