Where to Buy Kosher Wines Honolulu HI

High-End...and Kosher!

Like their Egyptian ancestors who reached freedom through the Red Sea's parted waters, American Jews found liberation from Manischewitz, this time near Mount Hermon, north of Mount Sinai. The saga began 30 years ago when Israelis planted grapevines on the Golan Heights.

The vines went into the high-altitude plateaus and hills cooled by snow-capped Hermon in 1976. Syria lost the Golan in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel strengthened its grip there in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. And in 1984, a year after the Golan Heights Winery's founding, its 1983 Yarden Sauvignon Blanc reached American Jews, shocking them. It was white, light, dry and kosher.

The Eternal Verity in the United States (but not in Europe) that kosher wine had to be red, heavy, sweet and made from Finger Lakes Concord grapes was splintered--just as Commandments 11-15 were when Mel Brooks, playing Moses in "History of the World: Part I," dropped one of three tablets.

In today's ever-expanding kosher wine appellations, no monolithic styles are engraved in stone--as demonstrated by a new brand, Goose Bay's savory 2005 Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand (imported by the Royal Wine Corporation). Yesterday, an $18 Marlborough white exuding prototypical grassiness could not be easily found at American seders.

A widespread misconception is that wine turns kosher, hocus-pocus, by being blessed. No way. It is kosher (Hebrew translation: pure, fit, proper) if it results from strict rabbinic production criteria that render it suitable for religious Orthodox Jews' use.

This Passover (for the Orthodox, Wednesday evening, April 12, through April 20), the modern wines in the four ritually drunk glasses will have diverse sources. Offerings from Skyview Wine, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York, and from Hungarian Kosher Foods, in Skokie, Ill., a Chicago suburb (perhaps the country's largest kosher-wine retailers) resemble the index of a paperback wine book.

"Over 450 kosher wines to choose from!" declares www.skyviewwine.com , which enumerates their sources: California, New York, Argentina, Australia, Chile, France (including Alsace), Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, South Africa and Spain. Regional breakdowns reveal a multiplicity of styles, quality and possible terroirs.

"Terroir" and "kosher" could not occupy the same sentence when the choices for sabbath and holiday celebrants consisted of variations on such Kedem-brand themes as Cream Red Concord, Cream Niagara and Blush Chablis, produced in the Hudson River Valley from upstate New York's labrusca grapes.

Not that the Kedem-Manischewitz-Mogen David axis is déclassé. No snobbish thinking, please. For neophytes, acceptance of the simple, homey virtues of Concord's Day-Glo flavor appeal and swooningly velvety texture is Chapter One of a wine education.

Slip-skin Concord, plucked in high September from an ...