Attention: Major Media Outlets
To whom it may concern,
Every spring, major newspapers and other media sources offer their requisite nods to the Jewish holiday of Passover. As the holiday’s central ceremony — the seder — commands the consumption by each participant of four full glasses of wine, journalists have discovered that they could annually review kosher wines for the benefit of their semitic readership and the general cultural edification of the less-Hebrewed.
While those of us in the kosher community certainly appreciate this effort — especially in a country only two percent Jewish, and where only a fraction of that group actually cares about exclusively drinking kosher wine — it is time to put to rest the oft repeated lamentation about the sweetness of traditional kosher wines, in contrast to the variety and quality of those rabbinically-approved quaffables now available from far-off locales like Israel, Chile, Australia, and France.
I do not deny that my family would religiously imbibe Manischewitz’s alcoholic syrup — Extra Heavy Malaga, no less — to sanctify the year’s many Jewish festivals. Certainly, the ubiquity of sweet wines in the American Jewish experience was the reason why Joan Nathan, in a 1981 Passover-themed article for the Washington Post, first remarked, “For my part, I was shocked when I learned that my in-laws do not consider the kosher Israeli dry cabernet sauvignon a substitute for Manischewitz sweet.”
And for more than two decades since, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Washington Post, the Independent of London, the Toronto Star, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, the Orlando Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Denver Post, USA Today and many others have used this reliable, but now tired observation to mark many Passovers and any kosher oenophilic milestone to hit the news.
Suffice it to say: we get the point. Though many of us still enjoy our wine on the sweet side (the relatively new Moscato trend a perfect example), everyone who cares about kosher wine knows that there’s ample dry stuff to choose from.
Keep the coverage. Lose the cliche.
Respectfully yours,
The Kosher Blog