Seder Wines

With Passover approaching, and the first Seder scheduled for Wednesday, March 27, it's a pleasure to report, as we have for several years, that it is easy to drink a number of Kosher wines for the holiday even if the imbiber gets no special benefit in the hereafter from the action. In recent years, with wine drinkers seeking better quality, from real wine grapes and not just those that came from the Concord and similar grapes that upstate New York produces.  Those wines often were foul; the "foxy," mouth-puckering flavor added a few extra sentences to the prayer over the wine.  The first was a hope that drinking it not turn into a painful experience. Today, the same grapes that go into the better Bordeaux and Rhone offerings from France, and the equally improved California varieties – cabernet sauvignon, merlot, grenache, syrah, zinfandel, mourvedre, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay  – go into wines vinified, aged, blended and bottled under Kosher conditions.  Wine is made in Israel, of course, and there are vineyards on the Golan Heights.   One of the most famous of the French Bordeaux winemakers, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, whose house makes the famous Chateau Mouton Rothschild, has been making Kosher wines for many years, but entered the export business only in the last few. The winemakers placed the Kosher emblem on a real Bordeaux, a blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot, like almost all the wines of the region.  It's from the 2000 vintage, and it carries the Mouton Cadet Rouge label, and a retail price of about $16. Mouton Cadet, available almost everywhere, is a second label from the winery.  Don't expect first-growth Bordeaux, but it usually is a well-made wine with pleasant fruit, ready to drink sooner than the best Bordeaux. Herzog Wine Cellars, in Santa Barbara County, makes a number of Kosher wines under the Baron Herzog label and in a wide range of prices.  Grapes are trucked in from other parts of the state to the winery in Santa Maria, Calif. Where the grapes are grown, not where they are vinified, determines the appellation, and shipping grapes by truck does not disturb the Kosher label.  Once they are pressed, a number of new rules about handling and blending the juice come into play. Surprisingly, the least expensive of the wines, at about $7 retail, was one of my favorites.  A 2000 chenin blanc from the Clarksburg area of Solano County, it showed tartness and fine citrus flavors with a hint of gooseberry that set it apart.  Splendid with broiled halibut or monkfish, or with roast chicken or as an aperitif, and there is a slightly sweeter touch in the finish, perhaps from a late addition of the juice of another grape. At the other end of the price spectrum, a reserve cabernet sauvignon from Napa, at a rather excruciating retail price of $35, was surprisingly light.  The label describes it as a wine of medium body, and that evaluation was a kindness. The 1998 vintage wine had a pleasing, plummy flavor, and a pleasant finish, but it needed more body and more power. The other two Herzog wines, a zinfandel and a chardonnay, both 100 percent of the grape on the label, each had a retail price of about $13.  The zin, from the Lodi region of central California, was a lovely color and had the bramble flavor of good zinfandels, but left a rather hot taste on the finish.  The chardonnay, from three northern California regions, had been barrel fermented and there were pleasant hints of oak along the way. Observant Jews drink Kosher wines all year, not just at Passover, and the choices are growing.  Wineries in Chile (Alfasi), Australia (Teal Lake), France (Skalli, Chateau Giscours, Rothschild) all produce Kosher wines, and a South African Kosher winery is under construction.