Israel's oldest fruit just became its newest spirit: meet the distillery reviving a 2,000-yr-old tradition

Just ten kilometers from Jordan, in a small community in northern Israel called Revaya, someone is doing something nobody's done here in two thousand years — turning dates into alcohol.

The distillery is called Zoara, a small, locally owned operation tucked into the Valley of Springs — a region long considered one of the most fertile landscapes in the ancient world.

For thousands of years, this stretch of the Jordan River Valley — from the Sea of Galilee down to the Dead Sea — was exactly that: abundant, full of palm trees and flowing water, according to the Bible itself. Dates were its most celebrated fruit, woven so deeply into life here that a nearby city, Zoar, was simply known as the City of Dates.

And today, Zoara, which is named after that very city, is working with the dates that aren't exactly celebrated — the ones farmers throw away because they're considered too "ugly" to sell.

The Backstory Nobody Told You

Every date harvest, farmers sort their crop by quality. Grade A goes to the fancy stores. Grade B, somewhere a step down. And then there's Grade C — dates that are identical in sugar and quality to the export-grade fruit, just not pretty enough to make it to a shelf. For years, they went straight in the trash.

Zoara’s founder Arnon Enoch looked at that waste and saw an opportunity instead.

"We're a distillery that makes alcohol from dates," he told me. "All the drinks we make are based on Medjool dates. We distill the dates and create Date Spirit. There's a very large amount of waste of dates that simply aren't beautiful enough to make it to the stores," he said. "But their sugar is perfect."

One industry's surplus becomes another's raw material — that's the whole business model in a sentence. And there's a lot of surplus to work with.

Israel isn't just a date producer — it's the world's largest exporter of Medjool dates, supplying somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the entire global Medjool market. Total production runs around 67,000 metric tons, most of it grown along the Syrian-African Rift Valley — the Arava Desert, the Jordan Rift Valley, the Megillot region by the northern Dead Sea, and right here in the Valley of Springs. At that scale, even a small percentage graded "not pretty enough" adds up to an enormous amount of fruit with nowhere to go. That's the gap Zoara stepped into.

And they've done more with it than you'd expect from a single fruit. From one base spirit, Zoara now produces half a dozen different drinks — gin, arak, limoncello, date brandy and a mandarin liqueur among them — each one infused differently with botanicals pulled from the surrounding land.

A History That Vanished — and Came Back

The tradition of making alcohol from dates disappeared almost two thousand years ago.

So what happened? Empires happened. "It was interrupted because there were successive empires here, including the Romans, and then Muslims who grew dates but didn't drink alcohol," Enoch explained.

Long before that, he told me, people across the region — Jews in Babylon, Iraq and Morocco — made their own arak from dates at home. It just never got past the kitchen table. "And now we've arrived in modern Israel, and this is an opportunity to create a historical full circle."

It's the same instinct that turned rice into sake in Japan, or agave into tequila in Mexico — just with a few-thousand-year gap in the middle. Enoch actually founded the company back in 2021 under the name Jordan Spirits, before it became Zoara — years of research and experimentation into how to bring a lost craft back to life. He's been making alcohol for sixteen years total; this particular obsession is five years old.

Inside the Tanks

The process itself: Zoara buys the rejected dates — which, at over 60 percent sugar, are basically nature's sugar capsules — and ferment them with wine yeast to make an elegant date wine. That gets slowly distilled into a crystal-clear eau de vie, smooth and aromatic, carrying the dates' own natural notes of cocoa, caramel and vanilla. What comes off that still is a jaw-dropping 88 percent alcohol. I felt that one in my bones.

By the time it hits the bottle, it's cut down to around 40 percent for the gin and arak. And unlike whiskey or brandy, it doesn't need years in a barrel to get there — this spirit can be shaped while it's still young.

From there, every spirit takes its own path — infused with botanicals pulled straight from the surrounding land. Sage and tarragon from the Jordan riverbanks. Mulberry from the slopes above. Wild herbs foraged from the hills of Gilboa. Heritage mandarin peel from the valley itself. Nothing imported, nothing generic — fourteen different plants go into the gin alone.

That mandarin, by the way, has its own story — a heritage Jaffa variety that's basically extinct in commercial orchards now. Enoch's team knows the handful of surviving trees personally and hand-picks them each season, leaving the peels in the alcohol for their essential oils before distilling.

And people are noticing. The gin won a silver medal at the London Spirits Competition in 2024 — in, Enoch told me, one of the toughest categories there is.

What's Actually in the Glass

I didn't just hear about this — I tasted my way through it. There's a daiquiri built on date brandy and cardamom. A seasonal gin infused with mulberry and grapefruit peel, the mulberries grown in a nearby moshav. A cocktail called Jasmine, mixing the gin with that mandarin liqueur. And, of course, arak — because you can't do a spirit tasting in Israel without it.

Enoch makes the case that arak and dates were always meant to find each other: "It's anise-based, round and oily, and that's exactly what the date alcohol needs. It's very Mediterranean." He's not wrong.

Where It's Headed

Zoara is already making tens of thousands of bottles a year and just started exporting to Japan. Enoch's hoping the United States is next.

What struck me most, though, was something he said almost in passing — that Israel and its Arab neighbors are basically the only places on earth where Medjool dates grow at this scale. And since most of those countries don't produce alcohol, Zoara has, as Enoch put it, "essentially found ourselves sitting on the mother lode of dates."

The Bigger Picture

Zoara isn't a one-off, either. Michal Akerman, Deputy Head of the Valley of Springs Regional Council, told me the idea behind this distillery- turning waste into magic- is exactly the kind of thinking the region is trying to build around — because the old way of farming here isn't going to survive climate change.

The Valley of Springs has been an agricultural region since before the state existed — the kibbutzim here go back to the "Tower and Stockade" period. But it sits on the Syrian-African Rift, one of the most ecologically sensitive stretches of land in the country, and Akerman says climate change is hitting it hard. Traditional farming, done the traditional way, isn't going to cut it.

"We want to bring a new, younger generation into agriculture, because farmers are getting older," she said. "And for that, we need to be very creative."

She pointed to Zoara as the textbook example. "This valley grows a huge amount of dates... there's Grade A, Grade B, Grade C. Grade C usually goes in the trash. What the young people you're about to meet did was take the Grade C dates and turn them into an alcoholic beverage made from dates. That's innovation. That's creativity."

It's not just dates, either. The same region is turning discarded olive pits — which cause real problems in the soil if left to rot — into flour for bread and crackers. Fish farmers who used to raise carp, mullet and tilapia are now growing sea bream, sea bass and the first blue-and-white Israeli salmon. Different products, same logic: stop throwing away what doesn't fit the old model, and find a new one.

And none of it stops at the border. "Agriculture has no borders," Akerman told me. "It's not a country. When there's a pest, it crosses. When there's something good, that can cross too." Farmers here share water and pest data with Jordan constantly — because a date pest doesn't check passports.

So next time someone hands you a gin and tonic, ask where the gin's from. If it says Zoara — you're drinking two thousand years of history, and one region's bet on reinventing itself, dressed up as a night out with friends.