A Legendary Fruit
The pomegranate, with its rich, succulent flavors and healthful qualities, has become an increasingly popular ingredient in a wide variety of food and beverage products around the globe. Rimon, the Hebrew word for pomegranate, is the first winery to create wines exclusively from a specially cultivated form of this most historic fruit.
A symbol of health and beauty, prosperity and royalty, fertility and abundance; this extraordinary fruit has for centuries been celebrated in the art, mythology, religious texts and literature of Jewish, Greek, Muslim, Christian, and even Chinese and Egyptian cultures.
The pomegranate is one of Israel's oldest indigenous fruit species, and today remains a regular item on Middle Eastern tables. It has a strong place in Jewish tradition, and many have the custom of eating pomegranates on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The Torah, in praise of Eretz Yisrael, mentions seven fruits of the land: it is “a land of wheat and barley, of the grapevine, and the fig, and the pomegranate, a land of the olive for oil and [the date for] honey” (Devarim 8:8).
The pomegranate also appears frequently in Greek mythology and is commonly eaten at Greek weddings and funerals. Due to its profusion of seeds, the ancients connected the pomegranate with procreation and abundance and believed the goddess Aphrodite, the deity of love, had planted it on the isle of Cyprus. It was because of the tiny, red pomegranate seeds that Demeter's daughter, Persephone, was carried off by Hades to live a life divided between the underworld and the upper world.
The fascinating fruit was also of great importance in the Muslim world. Brought west by the great Islamic expansion, it was cultivated throughout the southern Mediterranean. It even gave its name, Granada, to the last Moorish capital of Spain.
In its praises of the land 3,500 years ago, the Bible too gives mention to the ancient fruit. In fact, many biblical scholars believe it was the pomegranate, not the apple, that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Brought to China a century and a half before the Christian era, the pomegranate is also depicted in the floor mosaics of Pompeii. Historians have even found it described in Egyptian papyri.
Today the pomegranate combines wonderful flavor with unique benefits for human health. Chefs from around the world include the seeds of the pomegranate in their recipes, capturing the flavor of one of the world’s greatest fruits with a tradition that goes back to an age long before recorded history.
