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of kosher wine, whereby only observant Orthodox Jews were allowed to be involved in the production and bottling. The hot wrench that got thrown into the winemaking machinery was the insistence of some rabbinical authorities that kosher wine be boiled, so that heathens wouldn’t recognize it as wine and use it in their own rituals. This boiled, mevushal wine, which has lost most of its winelike qualities and all the nuances we talk about when we talk about wine, has for centuries succeeded in scaring off serious wine drinkers.

The kosher wines that are of interest to readers of this column, whether Jewish or gentile, are those that, one way or another, circumvent the mevushal process. (Nonmevushal wines meet strict kosher guidelines, I’m told, provided they’re not opened or handled by a nonkosher waiter or sommelier.) The best advice I can give you is to look at the label, and if the wine is mevushal, pass it over. Walk on by. Or, better yet, run.

For Passover and other occasions, there are dozens of serious kosher wines to consider, including wines made under Orthodox supervision at estates like Bordeaux’s Léoville-Poyferré and those made at kosher properties in Israel and California.

Yarden, in the Golan Heights, Israel’s coolest growing region (we will pass over disputes about sovereignty here), is producing uncooked kosher wines to tempt the heathen palate. Golan is an agricultural paradise, a beautiful and haunted landscape. Site preparation for Yarden’s El Rom vineyard in the so-called Valley of Tears—the scene of a massive armored battle in the Yom Kippur War—required the removal of the hulks of 250 Syrian tanks.

Since 1992, Yarden wines have been made by California-born Victor Schoenfeld, a cheerful, nebbishy University of California at Davis graduate who apprenticed at Mondavi and Chateau St. Jean, and whose wife is a major in the Israeli army. Schoenfeld has been fashioning serious ageworthy kosher Cabernet Sauvignons for the past decade (and has recently taken on Sonoma’s Zelma Long as a consultant). At a recent vertical tasting at New York’s Union Pacific restaurant, the 1985 was still showing well, and several of the later vintages were outstanding. I can’t necessarily recommend the Chardonnay, however—tasting the 2000 vintage, I kept checking my tongue for oak splinters. But Yarden makes a very good Blanc de Blancs, a promising Pinot Noir, and an excellent dessert wine—all of them extremely well priced.

Dalton, based in the Galilee region, makes a beautifully balanced Chardonnay, though I find its reds sweet and cloying. A very promising new source of premium kosher wines in Israel is Recanati, in the Hefer Valley. Cofounded by an Israeli of Italian heritage, the winery is named after the owner’s ancestral village. At about twenty dollars, Recanati’s 2003 reserve Cab is a steal.

Some of Bordeaux’s finest wines are available in limited-quantity kosher versions, thanks in part to the influence of the Rothschild family. Probably the best value for the Passover table is the kosher version of Mouton Cadet from the Baron Philippe de Rothschild group; this premium wine is one of the most widely distributed in the world. The 2000 vintage has produced a wine of real distinction and character.

In America, the finest kosher wines of which I’m aware are being produced under the Baron Herzog label. Herzog has adopted a technique of flash-pasteurizing the juice at 165 degrees; this process seems to have very little, if any, deleterious effect on the finished wine and qualifies the wine to bear the mevushal label. The Special Reserve Chardonnay from the Russian River Valley is usually outstanding, and the reds are well made and well priced. Herzog is owned by the Royal Wine Corporation, which also imports a wide range of kosher wines of wildly diverse quality. Some of them will appeal to oenophiles regardless of their heritage; others will undoubtedly please those who look back fondly on the grape syrup of seders past.

BODY AND SOIL

The quaint, red-roofed town of Wettolsheim, in Alsace, rolls up its sidewalks