Today marks the midpoint of Hanukkah, and Christmas is just days away. What better time, then, to celebrate with a bottle of sparkling wine from Israel?

Many people still associate sickly sweet Maneschewitz-like wines with Israel, but in recent decades, the country has quietly undergone a quality revolution. “It was the late-1970s planting on the volcanic soils of the Golan Heights, from 1,300 feet above the Sea of Galilee up to 4,000 feet towards Mount Hermon,” The World Atlas of Wine explains, “that signaled a new direction.” The Oxford Companion to Wine concurs, noting that “Planting vineyards with noble varieties in cooler, high-altitude areas, combined with internationally trained winemakers and expertise… had dramatic effects.”

But winemaking in Israel dates back thousands of years, and wine appears frequently in the Bible’s Old and New Testaments. That tradition continued under Roman and Byzantine rule until AD 636, the Oxford Companion relates, “when the spread of Islam brought about the destruction of the vineyards.” Crusaders started wine production again in about AD 1100, but maintained it for only about 200 years: “With the exile of the Jews, vine-growing ceased.”

As Jewish people returned from the Diaspora centuries later, winemaking began once again. Galilee in northern Israel is the best-quality region, according to every resource I’ve consulted, its high-altitude vineyards offering a beneficially cooler climate than the coast. Jesus grew up in this region, in Nazareth, and it makes sense: If you’re the son of God, of course you would choose to live in the best wine region you could.

The Golan Heights Winery is the third largest in Israel, and it helped lead the quality revolution by planting vineyards of noble international varieties in the Golan Heights in 1976. The winery’s 28 vineyards “range in altitude from 400 meters (1,300 feet) at Geshur, up to almost 1,200 meters (3,900 feet) at Odem,” according to its website, and these vineyards are further divided into 400 separate blocks. The grapes from each are stored and handled separately throughout the winemaking process, allowing Golan Heights to get a real feel for each parcel’s terroir and determine which varieties grow best where. I was also excited to see that Golan Heights was the first winery in Israel to grow its grapes organically.

I picked up a bottle of its NV Gilgal Brut, a 50% Pinot Noir and 50% Chardonnay blend named after the Gilgal Refaim, an enigmatic 5,000-year-old assemblage of some 42,000 basalt rocks arranged in concentric circles located near the winery. This light straw-colored wine proved to be delightful, with aromas of red berries, yeast and round, orangey citrus. It felt full and ripe in the mouth. The berries and yeast were there, along with zesty acids and a froth of prickly bubbles. The finish was quite tart, with pronounced notes of green apple. I tried it again after it sat open in the refrigerator for two hours, which gave it time to develop a rounder note of vanilla.

What a fun, cheerful sparkler, and food-friendly, too. Its racy acids paired especially well with some crab Rangoon, cutting right through the richness. The Gilgal Brut would surely do well with just about any cheese or cream-based dish, making it ideal as an apéritif with cheese and crackers. I really want to try it with cheese fondue.

Making a sparkling wine in the Champagne method with traditional grapes requires great effort and significant investment in infrastructure. But it makes sense that Golan Heights would want to dive into such an elaborate project. The head winemaker, Victor Schoenfeld, worked at Jacquesson, a 200-year-old Champagne house in France, before he joined Golan Heights. His Gilgal Brut clearly reflects that experience.

I purchased the Gilgal Brut at Binny’s for about $14, which is quite a value for the money. If your wine shop has a Kosher section, you might also find it there (it’s Kosher for Passover).

There are any number of wonderful wines you can serve during Hanukkah and Christmas, but I found it particularly satisfying to sip the Gilgal Brut, which has a direct connection to the Holy Land. It’s a very fun and festive wine, but it offers an opportunity for reflection as well.

Single-vineyard wines are nothing new. Burgundy has perhaps the most famous examples, and in recent years, vintners in the U.S. have also started marketing vineyard-designated bottlings. But it’s still relatively rare to see single-vineyard wines from anywhere in South America, which has a shorter history of high-quality winemaking.

Vinous excellence is certainly no stranger to South America now, however, as illustrated by this recent tasting, and this one, and this one. It makes sense that ambitious winemakers would now want to take things a step further and start delving into the subtleties of terroir.

The word “terroir” refers to all the factors affecting a certain patch of land, be it soil composition, exposure to light or wind, elevation, rainfall, etc. Wines lose their sense of terroir in direct proportion to the size of the geographical area from which their grapes were harvested. A Sonoma Coast wine will have, in theory, more of a sense of terroir than a wine labeled simply “California,” even if the Sonoma Coast wine comes from more than one vineyard.

This concept sounds esoteric, and you may very well be wondering, who cares? And it’s true that a single-vineyard wine does not guarantee quality, nor does a blended wine necessarily suffer in any way. Some of the world’s very best wines are blends. But single-vineyard wines most often come from vineyards that winemakers regard as special. Setting the grapes from this vineyard aside allows them to display all of what makes that particular site great. A single-vineyard wine also connects the taster to the land in a way that a blend, however grand, simply cannot.

I was very excited, therefore, to learn about Lapostolle‘s single-vineyard Carmenères and Syrahs. I can’t recall tasting single-vineyard Chilean wines before, and I’d never tried a single-vineyard Carmenère from anywhere. This variety was popular as a blending grape in Bordeaux in the 18th century, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine, but it slowly fell out of favor for various reasons, and now it rarely pops up in its homeland. The grape arrived in Chile from Bordeaux in the 19th century, where it was mistaken for Merlot until 1994. Now, just 20 years later, Carmenère has become the signature variety of Chile.

The country may be extraordinarily narrow, but the terroir varies as much east to west as north to south because of the effects of the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. It was absolutely fascinating, then, to taste single-vineyard Carmenères from Marchigüe, near the Pacific, Apalta, in the middle of the country, and Portezuelo, closer to the mountains (as illustrated by their labels).

Each was a delight. The 2010 Marchigüe smelled of plum jam, and it had dark fruit leavened by bright green peppercorn spice. The 2010 Apalta had a heady, jammy aroma and flavors of ripe dark-red fruit and big but focused white peppercorn spice. The group favorite, however, was the sexy 2010 Portezuelo Carmenère, with its creamy raspberry aromas and big, dusky fruit. Some smokiness and meatiness undergirded the fruit, and despite the ripeness and sultriness of the wine, it maintained impressive focus. Though each wine came from the same grape, the same vintage and the same producer, each had its own distinctive character.

I also had the opportunity to try two of the six Syrahs, which come from vineyards running north to south. The 2010 Pirque and the  2010 Las Kuras both came from vineyards relatively close to the Andes, but the Pirque vineyard is in Maipo, and Las Kuras is in the Cachapoal Valley, the wine region immediately to the south. The Las Kuras Syrah smelled of chocolate and violets, and its bright acids and black pepper spice kept its dark fruit well in balance. The Pirque also had notes of chocolate and violets in its dark fruit aroma, but it felt silkier on the tongue and revealed itself more slowly than the Las Kuras. It had a freshness underneath its ripe, ripe fruit, like eucalyptus or green peppercorn. It felt sexy and very classy, whereas Las Kuras was more of a “punch in the face — in a good way,” as a fellow taster noted.

Either the half-case of Syrah or the half-case of Carmenère would be an ideal base for a wine-tasting party. It’s great fun to try the wines side-by-side to compare them. The boxes also make a beautiful gift for a wine lover you would like to impress. Each half-case costs $200, and you can purchase them at uncorked.com. The Carmenère box includes two wines from each of three vineyards, and the Syrah box includes six different wines.

I suspect we’ll be seeing more and more single-vineyard wines like these coming out of South America, and if these thoroughly delicious bottlings are any indication, we’re in for a treat.

Note: These samples were provided free of charge by Terlato Wines.

The word “Soave” does not tend to stir the heart of the oenophile. This white-wine country in Italy’s northeastern Veneto region started out well, when vineyards were confined mostly to hillsides. But after Soave received DOC status in 1968, it enjoyed  “an export boom, so production flowed off the small hilly zone onto the alluvial plain of the Adige river,” explains The Oxford Companion to Wine. Plains tend to produce far less interesting grapes than hills. Yields increased, leading to less-concentrated wines, and productive (but bland) Trebbiano Toscano began to invade the vineyards.

The World Atlas of Wine illuminates yet another important problem in Soave: “Almost 80% of the vineyards are cultivated by growers who deliver their grapes straight to the local co-op with no personal reputation for quality to uphold.” And, in its usual laconic style, The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia flatly states that “Most Soave is still overcropped, thin and acidic.”

It makes sense that producers devoted to quality would want to distance themselves from the Soave DOC, “…and in 2000,” as Sotheby’s explains, “Roberto Anselmi took his greatly admired wines out of the Soave appellation in protest.” He had tried for years to reform the Soave DOC without success, and he finally had enough. He wrote an open letter to Soave announcing his break:

I’m walking out of Soave and leaving it to its fate. Let it wear out its vital cycle, good luck to it, I want my freedom. Freedom to improve, to make a great wine without inhibitions, to fly onto outstanding varieties, with better training systems, to relate to world viticulture with no boundaries, rules, bureaucracy, to create an honest market for a great white wine from my terroir, from a terroir after my own heart, where passion and imagination will no longer be obstructed. —Roberto Anselmi, as translated on the Terlato website.

Now, Anselmi classifies his wines under the much broader Veneto IGT, making his wines akin to the Super Tuscans, which also don’t necessarily follow DOC rules.

Liz Barrett, vice president of corporate communications and PR at Terlato Wines, brought two of Anselmi’s single-vineyard Super Soaves to a BYOB dinner at Tango Sur in Chicago. Both vineyards, Capitel Croce and Capitel Foscarino, are high on south-facing hillsides, far from the alluvial plains disparaged in The Oxford Companion. And the wines are entirely or almost entirely Garganega, with no bland Trebbiano to intrude.

Garganega, according to The Oxford Companion, “can produce fine, delicate whites redolent of lemon and almonds which give Soave a good name.” But Garganega reaches its potential only in the Soave Classico zone (in hillside vineyards), “with yields kept well in check, and where it is allowed to ripen fully.” Anselmi is doing everything right, by the sound of things, and his care is reflected in his compelling wines.

We started with the 2013 Anselmi Capitel Foscarino, a blend of 90% Garganega and 10% Chardonnay from a vineyard composed mostly of volcanic tuff. The aroma had notes of grapefruit and minerals, and Barrett detected some peach. It tasted tart, but the smooth fruit and ample minerality kept things well in balance — a delicious combination. The acids ensured that this wine paired well with our appetizer.

Barrett liked the Foscarino best, but my favorite was the 2013 Anselmi Capitel Croce. This 100% Garganega comes from a vineyard with more limestone in the soil, which clearly affected the flavor. It had a sweeter aroma with some spice, and a wonderfully refined texture on the palate. I loved its creamy fruit, focused ginger spice and long finish dusted with subtle minerals. Very classy.

A quick internet search revealed that the Foscarino costs around $19-$22, and the Croce runs for $21-$25 (Barrett provided the samples to me free of charge). At these prices, such perfectly balanced and carefully crafted wines are an excellent value. I rarely pay more than $20 for a bottle, but these single-vineyard Super Soaves are now on my short list.

Twenty years ago, the wines of Argentina barely made a ripple on the vinous seismograph. Now that quality has dramatically improved, wine store shelves heave with bottles from this South American nation, and Malbec, formerly just an obscure Bordeaux blending grape, reigns as its signature variety.

But Malbec, as you might expect, is not the whole story. Lettie Teague recently praised the Cabernet Sauvignons of Mendoza in this Wall Street Journal article, and indeed, I sampled several beautifully fruity and focused Argentinean Cabernets at a recent tasting at Chicago’s Public Hotel. A well-balanced 2013 Tilia tasted fresh, ripe and spicy, and Catena Zapata, Argentina’s most storied winery, presented two big and lush Cabernet varietals and two wonderfully elegant Cabernet-based blends.

The winemaker of Catena Zapata, Alejandro Vigil, started his own project together with Adrianna Catena, focusing on “smaller varietals in Mendoza,” according to the press materials I received. They named this side label “El Enemigo,” which refers to “the enemy in ourselves, the one stopping us from trying something different — something extraordinary,” explained Enemigo representative Constanza Hartung, who manned the tasting table. The wines she presented, with one exception, did not rely heavily on Malbec or even Cabernet Sauvignon. Instead, these blends showcased Cabernet Franc.

Cabernet Franc is another variety frequently used in Bordeaux blends, and it is the dominant grape in the Loire’s red Chinon wines. I’ve also tried it from all sorts of other regions around the world, and Cabernet Franc makes a mean varietal in New Mexico and Virginia, oddly enough. But as far as I can remember, I’d never tried any Cabernet Franc-based blends from South America. The trouble with this grape is that it can sometimes take on some vegetal character, with potentially off-putting notes of green pepper. But that wasn’t a problem here. El Enemigo’s wines proved to be thoroughly ripe and vegetable-free:

2011 Cabernet Franc: This blend of 92% Cabernet Franc and 8% Malbec takes on a beautiful magenta hue, because the high altitude and cool climate of the Gualtallary vineyard from which it’s sourced cause the grapes to develop especially thick skins. A big and cheerful wine, with ripe fruit, bright acids and supple tannins.

2010 Gran Enemigo: Vigil seeks to emulate “the old Pomerol style,” according to the Enemigo website, with this blend of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot and Malbec. I can’t afford to drink Pomerol with any frequency, so I can’t compare this effort to its French inspiration. But if this wine is any indication of the character of Pomerol, I might have to splurge once in a while. It had a fresh, raisiny aroma and loads of red fruit, with big and focused white pepper spice. The finish went on and on. A delight.

 2010 Gran Enemigo Gualtallary Single Vineyard: Here Vigil forgoes Cabernet Sauvignon, blending 85% Cabernet Franc with 15% Malbec. Again, there was a freshness to the aroma, but it had notable undertones of earth and dark fruit. When I tasted it, I just thought, “Wow.” It was lush and rich, but simultaneously focused and clean. Quite a balancing act.

2010 Gran Enemigo Agrelo Single Vineyard: This wine combines Cabernet Franc and Malbec in the same proportions as the Gualtallary Single Vineyard, but because of the Agrelo vineyard’s lower altitude, it has a noticeably different character. It had notes of creamy red fruit, and it displayed impressively elegant restraint despite its obvious power. Very classy.

2011 Malbec: I did succumb to a traditional Malbec as well, and I’m glad I did. A gorgeous violet color, it smelled of perfumed dark fruit. It tasted big and beautiful, with the traditional dark cassis (currant) flavor, black pepper spice and some soft tannins on the finish. This Malbec, blended with 6% Cabernet Franc and 5% Petit Verdot, served as a reminder of what makes Argentina’s signature grape so wildly popular.

These wines aren’t especially inexpensive, nor are they all that easy to find (online retailers are the best bet). But if you’re looking for a nice gift for a creative wine lover in your life — someone who just needs to vanquish those enemies within in order to do something amazing — any of the above would be a fine choice.