On October 7, Rivka and Sam Baum were called to duty: Sam back to the IDF, Rivka to their flourishing new vineyard.
Despite being shomer Shabbat, they hopped into a car on Simchat Torah, driving from a Jerusalem synagogue back to their home seven miles away in Efrat, in the West Bank.
Hamas had just launched its cross-border terror assault. “It felt like a war movie. We made promises to each other. I told him ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got the wine this year, it’s on me’,” Rivka told the JC.
On 4 October, they had attended a Bruno Mars concert after a long week at the winery. “About 70,000 people were singing, ‘I’ll catch a grenade for you,” Rivka explained. She still cannot conceptualise that some Israelis would be doing exactly that only three days later.
Sam is now serving as deputy company commander of a combat unit in the IDF’s Harel Brigade. He has been in Gaza for just over a month, having been deployed during Chanukah. Prior to that, he served for five-and-a-half years in the Nahal Brigade.
Rivka, 28, from Manchester, and Sam, 30, from London, moved to Israel separately more than a decade ago. They met in 2017 while Sam was serving in the IDF.
“He was in the middle of his officer’s course, training in the south, when he saw vineyards blooming from the desert in Mitzpe Ramon at the Nana winery,” Rivka explained.
It was then Sam vowed that after protecting the land of Israel, he’d work it.
Following his discharge from the military, he was hired by the Castel winery, located in the Judean mountains.
“He started in the warehouse and worked his way up. Within a few years, he became the manager of the vineyard’s agriculture department,” Rivka said.
“We knew a man living on a little yishuv (settlement) who had turned his garden into a boutique winery. We used our life savings to buy it.”
The pair set up shop in Efrat. Rivka had to convince Sam, a perfectionist, to launch their operation even as their product was still a work in progress. “Our mentor, Avi Moskowitz, who owns Beer Bazaar in Jerusalem, told us we had to stop being artists. If we had drinkable wine, we needed to sell it and grow our consumer base from day one,” Rivka said.
They bottled their first wine in August 2021. The product’s label consists of their family name written in the font of the Torah, along with the image of a tree made of Rivka’s, Sam’s and their son Lavie’s fingerprints.
“On the back of the bottle, we wrote a passage in English, a prophecy that the hills of Israel would be filled with wine. People were so receptive that we pre-sold out in less than 24 hours,” Rivka said.
From the start, she decided to record their journey and post clips to Instagram.
“It’s important for us to show everyone how production works behind the scenes. We usually see established wineries pop up. We wanted to do something different,” she said.
“People enjoy following our experience as a family running a business literally in their house. We’ve turned most of our garden into a winery. At times of distribution and packaging, our home resembles a factory.”
With Sam called up, Rivka was left alone to tend to this year’s harvest, which had been completed a week earlier on Erev Sukkot.
“It started with fermentation, punching down the grapes. After a while, I realised I would actually have to make wine on my own for the first time,” she said. “Normally, I just sit back with the camera, film and upload clips to social media. But all the orders started pouring in and I didn’t know if I would be able to produce drinkable wine.”
At first, she took unfinished samples to Castel winery’s lab, where they would run tests for her. Afterwards, she made a series of adjustments until ultimately being satisfied with the end-product. “We’re now nearly sold out again. This year, we will be delivering some 600 bottles,” she said.
Before the war, the couple had put together a business plan, identified an estate and were in the process of looking for investors to expand their business.
Now, Rivka is looking forward to picking up where they left off. “We won’t give up. Our dream is to turn our wine into a top regional product, and not just in the kosher section for kiddush,” she said.
“Running the winery when the pillar of our family is in Gaza isn’t necessarily something I signed up for, but it is absolutely something I will continue to do every day until our family is reunited.
“Knowing that Sam, as well as my brother and nephew, are in an active war zone fighting to defend the existence of our people occupies 99.9 per cent of my brain space. We haven’t spent a single Shabbat together since October 7 and he’s come home four times, the longest time being a 48-hour period.
“As we enter the fourth month of war, I can say that I am incredibly proud of Sam and feel privileged to be part of these historical times when we can devote everything we have to our people and our homeland.”
