Carmel Greenberg grew up on a small moshav (farming community) in Israel, the daughter of parents who immigrated there from the U.S. Her interest in wine was fostered during visits to her sister while serving mandatory military service. Nonetheless, her first academic degree was not in enology: she majored in interior design at the Holon Institute of Technology, completing her degree in 2004.

While in school, Carmel worked at Yoezer Bar Yain, a restaurant in Jaffa, where, “. . . they sat me down with a book with different wine regions of the world and I got my first experience in tasting a lot of different wines.” This led her to forsake interior design after graduating; rather, she took a position with Derech HaYayin, a large wine store, with an extensive international selection of wines. There, she led wine appreciation classes and came to realize that to get a more serious education in wine, she’d have to go abroad.

She returned to the U.S. and worked as a cellar intern for the 2007 harvest at Rosenblum Cellars in the Sonoma Valley. In 2009, Carmel enrolled in the Viticulture & Enology program at the University of California, Davis, earning her B.S. degree in 2011. After graduating, she held harvest internships with Cakebread Cellars and Buccella Wines in the Napa Valley and became the enologist at Buccella in early 2013. She then joined Dominus Estate as assistant winemaker in late 2017, remaining there until spending a one-year stint as assistant winemaker with Italics Winegrowers beginning in mid-2020.

In mid-2021, Carmel was named winemaker at Clos du Val Winery. She crafts its award-winning Cabernet Sauvignon and says, “I have no experience making white wine.” In short, she didn’t choose to specialize in Cabernet Sauvignon, it chose her!

Carmel and her husband live in Napa, along with their two sons.