Region & History

Until 2012, a disused bakery stood in the south of Tel Aviv, hardly a place you'd expect to find whisky. A handful of entrepreneurs around Gal Kalkshtein bought the building anyway, brought in the Scot Jim Swan as an experienced consultant, and founded Israel's first whisky distillery, M&H. In 2013, the first mash ran through the new stills.

There was no homegrown whisky tradition before that. Israel has been drinking wine for centuries, along with Arak, the anise spirit of the Levant. Until then, whisky only reached the country from Scotland, Ireland, or the US, already bottled. In 2014, things got tighter still: the Chief Rabbinate made kosher certification mandatory for imported spirits and tightened checks on shipments. From then on, anyone wanting to be sure they were drinking Israeli whisky needed a domestic distillery regardless.

In 2017, M&H auctioned off its first bottles, a limited three-year-old single malt from a makeshift setup. The regular series took another two years to arrive. It wasn't until late 2019 that enough whisky had matured for regular bottling, released under the name M&H Classic. By then, word of the extreme maturation in Israel's climate had long since spread, and the young distillery enjoyed more international attention than its short history might suggest.

M&H didn't stay alone for long. In 2014, immigrant David Zibell founded the Golan Heights Distillery in Katzrin, on the Golan Heights, two stills in an area better known until then for wine and beef. In 2016, on Israel's Independence Day, his first whisky hit the market. Today, around a dozen small distilleries operate between the Golan Heights and the Negev desert, producing gin, Arak, and brandy alongside whisky, a young craft in an old wine country.