It has been a long while since we did a Celebrity Wine FAQ, mostly because Anne got out of the TV critic biz a couple years ago. However, when she recently got a press release about Mayim Bialik joining the new show FabLab (weekend mornings, check your local listings), it reminded us that Anne had done an interview with Ms. Bialik a few years ago and we’d never run it.
FabLab, by the way, sounds pretty awesome. It’s a news show for teens and tween girls looking at how science makes the world better. The idea is to encourage girls to get into science, technology, engineering and math (aka STEM) and, hopefully, even out the numbers in these male-dominated fields. Which does have a connection with wine, since it does take a certain amount of science to make wine.
What Mayim Bialik asked us
For those of you new to this blog, a Celebrity Wine FAQ is where the celeb gets to ask us a question about wine. We’re posting Ms. Bialik’s question because it’s pretty relevant this week, thanks to the start of Passover.
“It’s one of the thing we always ask,” she told us. “It’s one of the Urban Myths about Manischewitz. So why is Jewish wine so darned sweet? I’ve been told that there’s some history to the vineyards where the Jews moved in this country.”
And, as it turns out, there is a bit of history. With most of the immigrant Jews arriving and staying on the East Coast in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, that’s where they planted vines. And because it grows so well there, those vines tended to be Concord grapes, which produce a very bitter wine that must be sweetened to make it palatable (and we may be using that last term a little loosely).
But wait, there’s more to this.
We also checked in with our blogging friend and colleague Alleigh of A Glass After Work, who not only posted this cool explanation of how kosher wine is generally made, she explained that a lot of kosher wine is meshuval. For a wine to be kosher, either it has to be produced completely by Jews, from the grape growing to the bottling and transporting to stores. Or it can go through the meshuval process, in which the wine is heated just enough to make it kosher without inducing a full, rolling boil, which would evaporate the alcohol. But this boiling process also makes the wine sweeter.
Alleigh also pointed out that because people have come to know Manischewitz and similar labels as the very sweet wine it is, they haven’t changed that.
“Some kosher wine makers go for that sweetness factor simply because people expect kosher wines to be sweet,” Alleigh wrote in a message.
By the way, there are a lot of very good dry kosher wines out there both from France and Israel, and we’ve heard there are even some kosher wineries in California, but we haven’t been able to find them. Yet.
Oh, and a blessed and happy Pesach to everyone.
I think of Manischewitz as a Passover food, not as wine. As such, I like it…otherwise, not!
I think I’ve drunk it once. It reminds me a little of Catholic altar wine, which is usually pretty sweet and icky, too.