Talk-A-Vino

Wine is wine, right? So is whiskey, tequila, vodka, rum, and all the other liquors, do you agree?

Leaving cost aside, when choosing alcohol, your typical selection categories are “sustainable”, “organic”, “vegan”, “artisanal”, “biodynamic”, plus all the “certified” categories. And then there is a world of kosher, which trumpets all of those.

I’m sure many of you have heard of kosher food and many rules associated with it, in purchasing the ingredients, cooking, and consuming (don’t mix meat and dairy, for example). But wine is wine, right?

Ahh, no. There is kosher wine, and there is all other wine. And even the word “kosher” by itself is not enough when it comes to wine – the most important word on the bottle of kosher wine is not an appellation, not the name of the producer, not the name of the grape. The most important word is Mevushal.

Okay, if you are just buying the wine for yourself, and you observe kashrut laws, for the wine to be marked as kosher would be a perfectly safe choice. However, if you plan to drink that kosher wine anywhere outside of your house, you want to bring it to a kosher restaurant or to an event, this is where just the word “kosher” is not enough – the word you are looking for is “Mevushal”. The word must be present on the label, or you better leave your bottle at home.

Similar to any food which can be kosher or not, the kosher laws in winemaking are applied at all different stages of wine production, basically from planting and caring for the vineyard until the wine finally goes into the bottle. I have no intentions of diving too deep into the rules – just ask your trusted AI friend, and you will get as much (or much more) information as you want. But as we already said many times, just the word “kosher” on the bottle is not enough.

The kashrut laws extend further than just the liquid in the bottle. It also covers the service, the process of opening the bottle and pouring it into the glasses. And here is the culprit. The moment a non-Jewish person opens the bottle of kosher wine, the wine becomes non-kosher. same goes for the non-Jewish person pouring the wine into the glasses. And as you can imagine, this is an absolutely standard service situation, at any restaurant and any event. So now, finally, Mevushal is to the rescue! If the wine is marked “Mevushal”, then anyone can open the bottle and serve the wine, and it will continue being kosher!

While important for the kashrut, Mevushal used to be almost a swear word among wine lovers. 20-30 years ago, no wine aficionado would touch the wine marked as Mevushal. The reason is simple. To ensure that kosher wine remains kosher no matter who pours it, the wine had to undergo the Mevushal process.

Actually, if you like wine and want to know what “mevushal” means, the translation itself should really scare you – the word means “to cook” or “to boil“. If you ever have forgotten a bottle of wine in the car on a hot summer day, you perfectly know why “cooked wine” is such a swear word in the wine lover’s lexicon. So to become “mevushal”, the entirety of the wine had to be heated up to 180°F (82°C) – then the wine becomes mevushal and can be handled by anyone. And in the old days, the wine would also become undrinkable for the absolute majority of wine lovers. But thanks to modern science and technology, the mevushal process now is very similar to flash pasteurization – wine is heated very quickly, for less than a minute, and then immediately cooled off, thus avoiding inflicting any essential damage on the taste of the wine.

Whew, I hope you got it now. The kosher, mevushal, and the whole nine yards associated with it.

But, the fun with kosher alcohol is only starting now. As you now learned how sacred the grapes are in the Jewish religion, the game with all other types of alcohol becomes even more complicated, as you never know where the pitfalls are located.

Basically, you can look at it like this: if the liquor has anything to do with grapes in any shape and form (grapes/grape juice, wine barrels, whatever else you can think of), unless the bottle is marked as “kosher”, it can’t be served at a kosher restaurant or an event. For example, the vodka made from potatoes or wheat is perfectly appropriate. If the vodka is made from grapes – not at all, unless the bottle says it is kosher. If vodka was flavored by the wine/grape byproduct – again “NO”, unless it is marked “kosher”.

It all might sound somewhat innocent until you realize that lots and lots of higher-end scotches are “non-kosher” – for example, the majority of the Macallan scotches are not kosher. All of the double-wood, sherry cask, port cask, burgundy wine cask finishes and so on render the whisky “non-kosher” and can’t be served. That also affects quite a few of the Anejo tequilas… You really need to spend time to figure out a full pedigree on a bottle of scotch you are planning to serve at your event, or risk it being rejected by the caterer.

Anyway, you might imagine that I didn’t wake up in the morning with the thought “why don’t I write an extensive post about kosher alcohol laws”. Had to plan for a big event later on, so all the learnings were necessary and fresh, hence the desire to share.

We got together to taste some wines and to decide on our choices. The Georgian kosher wine I was able to procure would be a fine choice – tasty, not overpowering, well balanced – but “not mevushal” on the back label rendered it a “no go” option.

Tequila seems to be a popular choice of a sipping alcohol nowadays, and if it is just a blanco, no wood aging is involved, it is fine. Basically, all of tequila blanco is a safe choice even without saying “kosher” on the bottle, it is made out of the agave plant. The problem with good tequila is availability – for example, even the Ocho you can see in the picture is not really available, so we are going with Don Abraham Blanco, which is also hard to procure.

I already explained the problem with scotch, so the only options are the scotch which was not aged or finished in any of the wine casks. Balvenie 14 is simply too expensive, so we tasted both Johnnie Walker 18 and Tomintoul 16, and settled on the Johnnie Walker 18 as it was a bit more structured than Tomintoul.

There you are, my friends. Here is my story of selecting proper kosher wines for an event – and my hope that now you are a tiny bit more educated about the intricacies of kosher alcohol than before.

Until next time – cheers!