Kosher Blog

And the blends have it…

I hope you all had pleasant and meaningful and gastronomically interesting Sederim. I did and in the course of them had two noteworthy wines, both of which were purchased at Queen Anne Wine in Teaneck.

During the Shulchan Oreich portions of our Sederim we opened several good wines, but it is the two reds (one each night) that I will comment on. For the first seder, we had a 2002 Beckett’s Flat Cabernet-Shiraz (50%/50%) from the Margaret River region of Western Australia. As a quick side note, I believe that not all Beckett’s Flat wine has hashcagacha, so please be prudent, but all of their kosher wine is K-for-P and mevushal. This was a very pleasant, fruity and effectively semi-dry wine. It had a very full flavor, but was not heavy or thick. It had hints of cherry and other sweet berries that developed more as the wine opened up. The two grapes that constitute this wine marry very well and you can sense the interplay between them if you are familiar with both Cabernet and Shiraz. For those who find Shiraz to be a little too rough around the edges for many settings, this blend does a marvelous job of settling the Shiraz and kicking up the Cabernet. Beckett’s Flat wines are readily available and usually fall in the $15-$20 range.

Our second Seder dinner red was a 2000 Galil Mountain Yiron (Galilee), which is a 60% Cabernet-40% Merlot blend (non-mevushal). I am not particularly familiar with the Galil Mountain Winery, but I look forward to learning more. The 2000 seems to be the first bottling as the winery was formed then as “a joint venture of Golan Heights Winery and Kibbutz Yiron…. The winery is an enterprise that combines the unique features of the Upper Galilee mountains with the expertise of the Golan Heights Winery in producing top quality wines.” As the constituent grapes would suggest, the Yiron was a notably fuller than the Cab-Shiraz blend and had a noticeably sharper taste from expected greater level of tannin. Again, I felt that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts and that the interplay between the Cabernet and the Merlot brought out the best in both grapes. This is certainly a dry wine on the greater spectrum, but has a soft feel and a very smooth finish. Like the Cab-Shiraz, this had cherry notes, but the other hints of fruit suggested darker berries, and perhaps plums. And the oak from the wine’s prebottling aging comes through as well.. The bottle notes that this wine should develop nicely if well-shelved for 5-7 years and I could definitely see the potential for greater development (though this was a new purchase for us, it did already have 3.5-4 years under its belt). Like the Beckett’s Flat, the Galil Mountain Yiron runs just under $20 ($17.99 at Queen Anne Wine), but their single grape bottlings are in the $12-$15 range.