Fourth Annual Wine Class & Tasting – By Jon Stone

Our fourth annual Wine Class & Tasting took place on the evening of March 10.  Beth El’s own Bob and Carol Luskin of Belle Wine & Spirit Shoppe provided lecture and tasting of gourmet kosher-for-Pesach (KFP) wines from Israel, California, France, and Italy.  The wines were also Mevushal, not to be confused with meshuganah (which describes the effects of wine about two-thirds of the way through a seder).  Mevushal means that a wine has been flash pasteurized and therefore can be drunk by a strictly kosher-observant Jew, or can be used in rituals such as a Shabbos Kiddush or havdallah service, even though non-observant waiters or others have handled the wine.  Mevushal is a critical attribute for any wine that you want to serve at a kosher affair or bring into a shul such as Beth El. 

Bob also explained some of the practical benefits of following the rules for making kosher wine.  For instance, the requirement that a vine be at least four years old before harvest ensures that its grapes attain their full flavor character and hence better wine.  Besides the wines, we were treated to a terrific spread of KFP cheeses (camembert, gouda, you name it), babaganoush, stuffed baby eggplants, fruit and crackers.  A bit of fat on the tongue improves the taste of wines and allows more accurate wine tasting if your goal is to find wines that will go well with a seder or other meal.  We tasted twelve wines ranging from $9 bottle to $34 bottle, and it was interesting to note that for many of us price did not correlate with what we personally liked the most.  The Kraemer Brut, a champagne style wine at less than $10/ bottle, was among this reviewer’s favorites yet one of my table mates disliked it.  Our group split as to which merlot we liked better:  the Hagafen, intense and grassy at about $25, or the Yarden, smooth and round at less than $20. 

Ben Margulies explained to the rest of us that he has worked with merlots as part of his oenology (winemaking) studies and that he recognized the distinct taste of the Hagafen as resulting from longer contact of the juice with the crushed grape skins.  As usual, Bob regaled us with amazing wine stories.  If you have seen the movie Sideways, you undoubtedly recoiled at the scene in which someone unwittingly drinks from the bowl that other tasters had been using to spit their wine samples.  Bob suspects that scene was inspired from a real life incident in Napa Valley in which a tourist dunked a bread chunk in a spit bowl.  Feh!