Erez & Vered Saadon founded the Tura Estate Winery in the village of Rechelim in 2003. Their love for the land and farming, combined with meticulous attention to growing the highest quality olives and cold pressing them using state-of-the-art equipment, yields an award-winning olive oil you will truly savor.
Vered and Erez Ben Sa’adon are very connected to Israel and extremely passionate about the land. Half a year after they married, they took all their savings and bought 5 acres of vineyard in the village of Bracha. At first, they sold their grapes to other wineries, but because of bias against products from the heartland of Israel, Judea and Samaria, those wineries encountered difficulties selling to customers in Europe. So, the young couple took a course in winemaking and decided to take a leap of faith and produce wine themselves. Since then, the Tura winery has become a major success, the winery has become a popular site for wine lovers from Israel and around the world, and Tura wines and olive oil have gained praise and awards worldwide.
Erez was born in Jerusalem, the son of parents who immigrated to Israel from Morocco and Iran. At a young age, he moved to the village of Kochav Hashahar. He served in the IDF’s paratroopers brigade, and after his discharge, he decided to return to working the land, his first love. Erez oversees the entire production process, from growing the grapes and olives through marketing and sales.
Vered’s family history is particularly impressive: her Jewish grandmother, Liesje de Vries, was 15 years old when World War II hit the Netherlands. During the war years, the family moved from one hiding place to another. At first, Liesje was separated from her family and lived for a while on an island in northern Holland. After the war, Liesje married a Holocaust survivor, and the couple had two sons. Liesje’s Jewish son fell in love with his non-Jewish stepsister, Els. It was Els who began to get actively involved with Judaism and was interested in the cultural and religious past of her husband, Joel. The Jewish side of the family, some of which were already living in Israel, helped the young couple, and finally, they found themselves on the way to Israel with their two small daughters. Vered grew up in Jerusalem, and when she was 15, she met the young man who would later become her husband, Erez. When she was at the end of the 11th grade they were engaged, and they married during her senior year. Vered was pregnant when she went to take her final math exam, and by the time she graduated with a BA in education, the couple had three children. Today they are the proud parents of five children.
As one of the founders of the Tura Winery alongside her husband Erez, Vered became a "spokesperson of Samaria". People taste their wine and listen to her personal story and the story of the winery. Vered works tirelessly to give people a positive view of the land and people of Judea and Samaria and spread the true story of what's happening in Israel.
In 1997, the young couple looked for a place to settle down, and they decided to buy land in the village of Bracha. They took the money they received as wedding gifts and invested in the purchase of 20 acres. The community rallied around and helped them to buy a tractor, purchase the grapevines, and volunteers and friends came to plant the vines from sunrise to sunset. After waiting four years for kashrut reasons, they sold their grapes for the first time to one of the major Israeli wineries, and in the summer of 2003, they opened the Tura winery, which started with just 4 barrels. The entire Ben Sa’adon family took part in the work, including the small children. The grapes reached the winery with much excitement, and the work was done by hand with a lot of joy. They sent their first wine to the Golden Cluster competition, the annual wine competition of Israel, and surprisingly won the first of many medals to come for Tura Winery.
Today, Tura's products can be found in stores around the world and they have received many more medals and honors for their outstanding products.
They also began to produce award-winning olive oil which is held in high regard all across Israel.
As they began to grow olives, Erez knew that choosing the right location and climate was critical to the cultivation of the olives he was looking to produce. For this reason, they chose to plant their olives in the hills of Samaria on the banks of the Shiloh stream, where the rocky Terra Rossa soil, combined with a cool climate and healthy exposure to the sun, produces the high-quality olives Tura requires for all their products. His research led him to create a special blend of three distinct olive varieties, Picual, Barnea, and Arbequina to make Tura's olive oil even more unique. Because of the Saadon family's insistence on excellence, Tura Olive Oil not only has an exceptional taste and health benefits, but also has extremely low pH levels of less than 0.3% - much lower than the 0.8% acidity required for extra virgin olive oil.
Erez and Vered's story of faith and dedication is encouraging and deeply inspiring, and the amazing products they produce are evidence of God's faithfulness to the Jewish people as they return to and work towards the restoration of their ancient homeland.