Happy Easter and Passover Berserkers,
With this Easter weekend upon us, the LCBO up here in Toronto has been pushing Kosher wines like crazy both at tastings and with limited offers on Kosher wines. Naturally, as a good Berserker I couldn’t pass up the chance to both taste and buy some of these for our mutual enjoyment.
Kosher wine in general has had a very bad reputation – and deservedly so – amongst wine aficionados for decades now mostly thanks to cheap, sweet Concord grape concoctions that wouldn’t even pass muster as Welch’s grape juice. Making things worse, a lot of these wines were pasteurized to be made meschuval i.e. they were cooked to the boiling point. The emphasis was on simply making the wines kosher, not making good kosher wines and it showed.
This has changed rather dramatically in the last decade, particularly with many Israeli and American kosher wineries finally putting winemaking skills on an equal par with their kosher procedures. Further, flash pasteurization technology has improved to the point where it’s not outright killing wine. So here’s a look at some modern Kosher wines:
BARON HERZOG 2008 CHARDONNAY KP M $15.95 (LCBO) – A value-priced Kosher Chardonnay from California. Clear light gold colour. Medium bodied. A very pleasant but slightly weak floral nose of orange blossoms with a bit of oak. Despite being labeled as a dry wine, this had a pleasant slightly sweet flavor with a very small hit of acidity and mild oak flavors on the finish. A lot less acidity than the California Chardonnays I tasted recently at the 2011 California Wine Fair, however.
This wine caused many shocked reactions by other tasters. They were all surprised and commented on the sweetness which they did not expect from a Chardonnay. Here you can see it is clearly geared towards a Kosher consumer who might enjoy the sweetness a bit more. I enjoyed it but I agree it is neither a dry wine nor do I think this is a wine Berserkers used to the best California and Niagara Chardonnays and French Chablis would enjoy.
BARON HERZOG 2008 CABERNET SAUVIGNON KP M $15.95 (LCBO) – A value-priced Cab Sauvignon from California. Dark ruby red colour. Light bodied. Pleasant but faint berry nose. Sweet cherry flavors in the mouth, along with oak and very soft tannins. A well-balanced but also very mild Cab Sauvignon. To build on another thread on the board regarding energy and tension in a wine: this wine had perfect tension but lacked energy.
BARON HERZOG WHITE ZINFADEL KP M $10.95 (LCBO) –- Translucent pink color. Light bodied. The back label says it has a nose of strawberry and cotton candy which made me scoff, but guess what? That’s exactly right. It’s actually got a nose of strawberry and cotton candy. Truth in wine labelling.
This had a very light strawberry apple flavour in the mouth. Nothing more complex than that. A lot more refreshing than I was expecting.
BARTENURA MOSCATO KP M $13.00 (LCBO) –- This is a Kosher lightly effervescent Moscato kosher wine from Italy. For all intents and purposes, it’s a Moscato D’Asti. Light straw color, light body supported by the bubbles, and a nice vanilla and sweet peach blossom nose. Tastes of peach and sweet apple in the mouth.
This somewhat paled in comparison to any other Moscato D’Asti from Italy, which is bizarre because it is in fact a Moscato D’Asti wine made in Italy. Yet, it had about half the nose, half the sweetness, half the bubbles, and half the fruit flavor of a regular Moscato D’Asti.
RODRIGUES SEMI-SWEET EXOTIQUE WILD BLUEBERRY WINE KP 15.95 (LCBO) – This wine’s background is almost as messed up and way out there as my Asian-Jewish background is, which is why I just had to try it. It’s a sulfite-free Kosher but non-Meshuval fruit wine from Newfoundland, Canada from a winery founded by a Jewish doctor and his French Newfoundlander wife.
It’s got a nice dark blue color, medium-body and nose of – wait for it – ripe sweet blueberries. Very pleasant medium sweet taste of, um, blueberries. Seriously, what else were you expecting in these notes? 
Believe it or not, this is all actually quite an achievement because I have tasted a number of blueberry fruit wines from Niagara that don’t taste anything like blueberries, including an iced blueberry wine that you would think has super-concentrated blueberry flavors but actually didn’t. It’s very pleasant and works surprisingly well as a dinner wine. Note that this one should be drunk immediately.
BARON HERZOG JEUNESSE BLACK MUSCAT KP M $13.00 (LCBO) – Dark purple, near black in color, medium body, very good pineapple and grape notes in the nose. Almost identical to the Quady Elysium Black Muscat with two very important differences – this wine is less sweet and is not fortified up to 15%. It’s actually only 13% ABV and you would think that wouldn’t account for a great difference but it really does. Tastes of pineapple, orange, lemon and grape. Very fruity.
BARON HERZOG JEUNESSE K $13.75 (LCBO) – Note that though made from Cabernet Sauvignon, this is clearly a very different wine from their 08 Cab Sauv listed above which is meant to be a classical dry red wine. This is not.
This is a value-priced Cabernet Sauvignon from California with a deep purple-red color, medium body and strong nose of plum and berries. It’s the taste, however, that split tasters right down the middle.
As I have recently gotten into off-dry, semi-sweet and sweet German Riesling Spatleses and Ausleses, I have been wondering whether anyone would dare to make a similarly sweet red table wine. Lo and behold, here it is. A Cabernet Sauvignon with the sweetness of a spatlese, at least, and possibly even sweeter. Tastes of strawberries, very nearly jam-like.
Whoa. And I thought their Chardonnay was divisive. This one really freaked out a lot of tasters who thought they would be tasting a dry Cab Sauv, even more than their Chardonnay did. It’s certainly not a crappy Concord grape Manischewitz by any means, but it’s not exactly a full-on Cabernet Sauvignon either, at least not the type that the Berserkers – hell, even just regular consumers – would be used to in the least.
This wine is clearly intended to wake the Manischewitz crowd up and start them down the path to some real red wine. I enjoyed it, but I think this was more of a “right time, right place” kind of thing as it answered my question about a semi-sweet red wine.
This is a really hard wine to recommend because if you want sweet red, you’re really better of with a sweet red icewine. If you want dry wine, this won’t be for you. And once someone who drinks this makes the full-on transition to real dry red wine, I can’t imagine they will ever go back to this.
OVERALL: Wow. An incredibly mixed bag here. Kosher wines are clearly long beyond the old days of icky sweet purple “wine,” but you can clearly see in the wines I had an acknowledgment that the core audience has been raised on sweet wine (however crappy it was) and they seem to be acknowledging how difficult it will be to wean that audience off of the sugar.
This really makes the wines hard to recommend to Berserkers given the expertise of the group. The wines that were sweet weren’t full-on sweet enough and the wines that were meant to be “real” wines had enough sweetness in them to freak out regular wine drinkers.
Now this said, they definitely qualify as real wines, miles and ages away from the crappy stuff I refused to drink at Passover when I was a kid. However, they strike me more as novelty wines. I think they’re worth trying once but it is up to a Berserker’s individual tastes to see if they are repeat purchases. Cheers. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
![[shock.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0b1dcf699ec319f43254f92e3f145786dcd93904.gif "shock"){kind=small}
![[scratch.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/42a16863a8714da3c1604419e3eb9206bb87aa50.gif "scratch"){kind=small}
![[swearing.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8a0d3f3461d40641d294442fc2be78039bf94d19.gif "[swearing.gif]"){kind=small}