With a budget of about $750,000, mainly from the Jewish National Fund — a century-old Zionist organization that has helped transform Israel’s agricultural landscape — Mr. Drori and a dozen colleagues have since 2011 identified 120 unique grape varieties whose DNA profiles are distinct from all imports. Around 50 are domesticated, Mr. Drori said, 20 of them “suitable for wine production.”

Separately, researchers have identified 70 distinct varieties, using DNA and a three-dimensional scanner that has never before been successfully employed this way, from burned and dried seeds found in archaeological digs. The idea is to match such ancient seeds with the live grapes, or someday perhaps to engineer fruit “Jurassic Park” style.

Then there is proving that the old specimens were actually used for wine, not snacks. Mr. Drori points to one set that was recovered near the site of the destroyed Jewish temples alongside a shard of clay marked in an ancient Hebraic script, “smooth wine.”

He believes seeds found in donkey droppings in Timna — where copper mines date to King Solomon’s era, the 10th century B.C. — must have come from pomace, the residue left after winemaking, since animals would not have been fed fresh fruit.

He also cites a Talmudic reference to a sage who lived in A.D. 220 that mentioned “gordali or hardali wine.” That was picked up by a 16th-century scholar who used slightly different names, jindali and hamdani, and described jindali as “soft to chew and the wine weak,” hamdani as “hard to chew and their wine strong” — characteristics similar to those of their descendants today.

Given the difficulty of procuring the grapes from Palestinian farmers, Recanati produced just 2,480 bottles of the 2014 marawi, which is available in only about 10 Tel Aviv restaurants. The winery has about 4,000 bottles of 2015 marawi aging and hopes to soon plant its own vineyard to expand and refine the brand.