Jules Polonetsky
With the Passover seder meals behind us, it’s appropriate for those of us who put time into carefully planning the seder wines to assess what worked well and what could have been improved.
Having recently passed the Wine and Spirits Education Trust Level 3 certification and started a wine column, my extended family was impressed enough to trust me with the responsibility of choosing the holiday wines. I did my research, polling some serious wine geek friends and reviewing the recommendations of top kosher wine bloggers. Of particular assistance was the Kosher Terroir podcast, a wonderful series of discussions organized by one of best connected and beloved figures in kosher wine, S. Simon Jacob.
From his home in Jerusalem and previously in the U.S., Simon has befriended and supported just about every kosher winemaker you can name and is constantly tasting and discussing wine with his global network. For his Passover podcast, Simon dialed up 17 winemakers and wine experts from around the world and quizzed them on their strategies for the four cups. Check out the episode at Spotify or your favorite podcast app.
My seder plan was simple. Three cups of rose and a concluding sweet late harvest skin macerated wine from the creative Israeli winemaker Yaacov Oryah. But things didn’t go as planned. I started with an Israeli Champagne method sparkling wine for cup number one and then followed with the Dalton Pet-nat, so that my family could appreciate the difference between these two types of bubbly wines.
I explained the traditional champenoise method or “method traditionale,” which involves a complex process starting with the fermentation of a neutral base wine, followed by bottling, adding additional yeast, wine and sugar to induce a second fermentation in the bottle, slowly manipulating the bottles to allow the yeast to settle out and the residue to disgorge.
Finally, additional wine to add flavor and top off the bottle is added. Unless the wine is grown from grapes in the Champagne region of France and produced there, laws and treaties bar the wine from being labeled as Champagne. It’s a fairly elaborate and expensive process that we often don’t appreciate if we think of all sparkling wine as the same. Unless a wine is from the Champagne region of France or is labeled as using the traditional or Champagne-type method, sparkling wine may be produced much more simply, as is done with the popular but simpler Moscato D’Asti or Italian Prosecco. Cava from Spain does rely on the traditional method to round out the most common kosher sparkling options.
The sparkling wine that I introduced for the second cup was a Pet-nat, a wine that uses the “method ancestral,” a simple but refreshing style that bottles the wine before the initial fermentation is complete, trapping the carbon dioxide emitted and resulting in a lightly fizzy, hazy wine, capped with a beer bottle-type crown cap.
I figured this would be ideal for a second cup consumed on a still-empty stomach, before dinner. But what I forgot to consider was the seder service logistics, where the second cup is filled long before it is consumed, for references during the service including the traditional finger dips to spill out drops of the wine to mark each of the 10 plagues. Suffice it to say that this part of the plan “fizzled” out (literally, as in no more fizz). Strike one.
Strike two against my plan came when it was time for cup number three. This was time for the fancy Israeli pinot noir that I had selected, but having heard my lecture about the interesting skin macerated sweet orange wine, the seder guests didn’t want to wait for the fourth cup, when late-night sluggishness and wine haze would have set in. My credibility was already damaged with the fizzed-out Pet-nat and the seder guests demanded we adapt my plan and taste the sweet late harvest skin macerated Oryah Riesling.
The pinot ended up serving as the final wine of the evening. This may have been for the best, as plenty was left over and with a day of exposure to oxygen, the wine was even more delicious when consumed the next day with lunch.
One interesting footnote will be of interest to the kosher consumer who is aware that there is a Kedem kosher Champagne for sale, produced in New York State, not in France. This is possible due to a historical loophole. Much of the world agreed to respect the French demand to protect the Champagne brand decades ago, but the United States did not ratify those treaties.
Many U.S. producers were at that time using popular European terms for classic wines like sherry, Burgundy, Chablis and Champagne to label the style of the wines they were producing in the New World and didn’t want to give up the branding. But finally in 2005, the U.S. signed on to the international accord governing wine labeling, but with a loophole. If a producer had used the international names prior to March 2006, they could continue to do so indefinitely.
Kedem has produced New York Champagne for decades, enabling the company to be one of the few that can legally call its bubbly New York beverage Champagne, without the French origin or precise rules for production.
Jules Polonetsky is a Wine and Spirits Education Trust Level 3 Certified wine expert who writes for the Wine and Whiskey Globe when not occupied with his day job as CEO of a tech policy think tank. He is a former consumer affairs commissioner of the City of New York