Yein Kafrisin: Cyprus Wine in the Talmud
Most wine regions reach for a Roman reference. Cyprus has an older and stranger one: its wine is named in the Talmud, not as something to drink but as an ingredient in the incense burned in the Temple in Jerusalem.
A wine named in the Talmud
The Talmud's account of the ketoret, the Temple incense, lists eleven ingredients and then the materials used to prepare them. One of those is yein kafrisin — Cypriot wine. The onycha, tziporen, was steeped in it to sharpen and deepen its scent before burning. The quantity is specified: three se'in and three kabin, somewhere around twenty-eight litres.
You will usually see it written yayin kafrisin. Strictly the construct form is yein kafrisin; both refer to the same thing. What matters is the claim underneath: outside the Land of Israel, no other place's wine is singled out this way.
Why Cyprus, and why that wine
Cyprus sat on the sea routes between the Levant, Egypt and the Aegean, and its wine travelled. What travelled best was concentrated and strong — wine that survived a ship's hold and a warm climate rather than a delicate table wine.
That is the same logic that produced Commandaria, and it is why the island's oldest surviving style is a sweet wine from sun-dried grapes. Whatever yein kafrisin actually tasted like, it came from a wine culture built around concentration.
Brought back in 2008
In 2008 the Lambouri winery at Kato Platres — a family operation whose roots go back some three centuries — produced the first kosher wine made in Cyprus, working with Rabbi Zeev Raskin of Chabad of Cyprus. The first run was about twelve thousand bottles of a Cabernet Sauvignon and Grenache Noir blend, and it was named Yayin Kafrisin after the wine in the Talmud.
That winery trades today as LionSpirit, still at Kato Platres. Whether kosher production is current is a question for the winery rather than for this page: certification is a decision a producer makes season by season, not a permanent property of a place, and this directory has not verified it.
An audience that has not arrived
Israel is Cyprus's second-largest source of visitors and its fastest-growing, and the flight is under an hour. Yet reporting on the Lambouri kosher project noted that Israeli visitors were largely not turning up at the winery — the wine went to export rather than to tourists already on the island.
Kosher wine tourism is thin almost everywhere: of thousands of kosher labels worldwide, very few wineries offer anything to visit. Cyprus has the rarest possible claim to it and, so far, almost no one making the trip.
Related wineries
Contact details and locations for each are on their page.
More guides
The Krasochoria: Limassol's Wine Villages
The dense cluster of wine villages on the southern Troodos slopes holds more wineries than anywhere else in Cyprus. Here's how the region fits together.
Wine stylesCommandaria: The World's Oldest Named Wine
Still made in fourteen designated villages from sun-dried Mavro and Xynisteri, Commandaria has a documented history stretching back to the Crusades.
GrapesThe Indigenous Grapes of Cyprus
Xynisteri, Mavro, Maratheftiko and a handful of rare varieties being brought back from near-extinction — a guide to what actually grows on the island.