Lagrein Rosato 2011
Sudtirol - Alto Adige, Italy

The wines from Alto Adige are best described as “mountain wines” – vineyard sites range from 600 feet to a dizzying 3,300 feet above sea level.  Alto Adige also happens to be the largest apple-producing region in Europe, while another gastronomic local specialty is speck, a succulent smoky cured ham that tastes especially delicious with an aromatic glass of Alto Adige wine.

“Bringing nature indoors” – this was his goal for the project and construction of his new complex of winemaking facilities and cellars.  Focusing on sustainable construction techniques, biological building materials, and the use of renewable sources of energy, the project was inaugurated in 1995 and was soon recognized as the harbinger of contemporary winery architecture in Alto Adige and beyond.  Some of the highlights include:  a light-filled building with low-energy-consumption; abundant glass and wood; and, roofs with southern exposure that utilize photovoltaic solar energy for most of the winery’s energy needs.  The result is a place where wine and man co-exist in a natural, healthy, and aesthetically satisfying context that is free from harmful influences (e.g. electro smog), and which also fulfills the criteria for sustainable economic and agricultural activities. 

One wine we particularly love is the lagrein rosato. Lagrein is an important native varietal in Alto Adige where it is known for making fascinating, tasty, sharp wines.  Even as a rosato (same as rosé), this wine retains its trademark spiciness and herbalness along with a good healthy dose of floral violets and fruity red currants.  It lingers on the palate and is buoyed by Alois’ trademark Alto Adige acidity that reminds you of an alpine spring meadow.  Think young flowers, spring herbs, racy cold water from high mountain streams and a nice bite in the air.

The grapes are from seven to fifty-two year old vines from vineyards in the Bolzano area along the Talvera river and in the area of Ora at an altitude of 230 to 300 meters (750 – 980 feet); deep and rich alluvial soils.  Immediately after pressing the grapes, the rosé is fermented in stainless steel tanks, followed by sur-lie aging for four months. 

This dry, mid-weight rosé would be delicious paired with smoked fish, pâtés, terrines, duck en croute, and all that other good stuff…hurry! 

THE FROTHING MASS OF PINKNESS above is a close-up of grapes, juice, skins, pips, and stems fermenting their little hearts out in our in-store, micro-scale winemaking project. Timed to coincide with the just-concluded Cambridge Science Festival, the new wine is gurgling away  at Central Bottle in a 5 gallon glass carboy borrowed from winemaker-for-real Kip Kumler at Turtle Creek Winery in nearby Lincoln, Massachusetts.  

Our idea is to make a Beaujolais nouveau-style wine we can get into drinkable condition in a matter of few weeks, and before Liz Vilardi knows what we’re up to.  (She’s been in Burgundy tasting the real thing and posting her adventures here).

Fresh, local wine grapes aren’t available this time of year, of course, so on April 2 we get started with Chilean table grapes purchased at A. Russo & Sons market in Watertown.  We spend about $75 for enough grapes to just fill the carboy.  

The technique that makes the wine ready sooner than it might otherwise be is something called carbonic maceration, wherein an enzyme initiated fermentation takes place inside the whole, intact berries without the participation of yeasts at all.  We explained the process at length in a post here earlier this year (see  “CO2 to you, too”).

The primary fermentation involves nothing more than flushing the carboy with CO2 gas and filling it with whole grapes.  We leave a bit of stem on each berry because pulling it off would leave an open wound and destroy the integrity of the grapeskin.  

Once the jar is filled, we pump in a bit more CO2, insert an air-lock, and do nothing but watch it for two weeks.  Not much happens visually, but after 14 days a taste shows that the fruit is indeed undergoing a transformation. Less sweetness and a tiny tingle of ethanol suggest things are on schedule.  At 17 days we decide it’s time to empty the jar and crush the grapes the old fashioned way - with foot power, in a plastic tub, right on the floor of the shop.

Maureen checks her email while treading out the vintage in our mini-lagar.

We inoculate the freshly-crushed grapes with Lalvin BRL97 yeast and send the whole business back into the carboy to undergo a few days of conventional fermentation that will bring the wine to dryness or very near it, extracting more color and a bit of texture.  

On Saturday, April 20 the time seems right to drain off the free-run juice (below), and press the solids.

Last of the free-run juice drained-off. You can see the layer of fine lees at the very bottom.

Young Central Bottle guest gets first taste of the fresh wine and seems to like what she’s tasting

Working with nothing that couldn’t be found in a well-equipped kitchen meant we had no proper wine press, so we improvise by scooping the gross lees into a square of cheesecloth and wringing it out. We notice right away what we had been led to expect: the press wine is much more interesting than its free-run counterpart, offering substantially more extract, flavor, and grip.

Our nouveau wine is still quite foggy, but its coral-pink color is cheery; its aromas perfectly clean and rather pretty.  There’s a trace of spritz and some lively, but not puckering, acidity.  The flavors remind one taster of a dry version of Hawaiian Punch.

Central Bottle regular Vaughn Tan, who is a great help all afternoon, has the generosity to describe the results as “surprisingly wine-like.”  We’re thrilled with that.

Above, three of the five bottles yielded by our carbonic maceration experiment.

Having decided that any further manipulation would be superfluous (we expect to drink all the wine up within a week or two) we go straight to bottling, just 18 days since we first put fresh grapes into the carboy.

We hope to repeat the project on a little larger scale this fall when true wine grapes from some local vineyards become available, and have some real New England nouveau ready for Thanksgiving.

-Stephen Meuse

Yeah, that’s right, that’s life. I am reminded of the good and the bad and the simply “that’s life” to winemaking every time I confront it face to face. Yesterday and today I’ve had the pleasure of spending my days tasting (and tasting!) throughout the golden slope. It is truly an education. I could go on and on about all the interesting things and the interesting people, but I am going to let photos speak 1000 words on my behalf with a few extra words actually provided by me. Here goes:

Below is our first stop at 8:30 this morning - yes, 8:30 a.m. We met the lovely and chatty Francois Raquillet of Mercurey. I could have taken photos of bottles, but instead i found myself interested in the this intricate and beautiful family tree.  It is good to remember that this highly sought after land is often passed down from generation to generation. Look how long the Raquillets have been around.

After a quick visit with Francois we jumped in the car and headed to Chassagne-Montrachet to meet up with Sabine Mollard - her mother is the Morey of Marc Morey and Sabine now oversees most of the winemaking.  She’s adorable and real - she talks about her struggles to get to know Chassagne and Puligny. 

Below is the vineyard Les Caillerets in Chassagne-Montrachet - note the difference in the rows - that’s one producer’s row vs. another producers row.  One has tilled and one hasn’t yet… right? 

These are barrels in the far end of the cellar. The Chassin barrel is a new cooper many of our producers are checking out (and they like it by the way).

We checked into the 2011 vs. the 2012.  Yield is incredibly low for 2012 and most of our conversations have had to do with how to fill empty barrels (an empty barrel is bad - so most fill with water, sulfur and some with tartaric acid) and how much room the cellars have now. Many of the producers are seeing a 40% decrease in production which means the barrels won’t get filled with wine. It’s quite sad coupled with the lower yield of 2010 and 2011. Most say they consider a vintage lost if you couple the three vintages. It’s pretty intense the amount of room in the cellars that are normally filled with barrels.  Speaking of filling barrels - Sabine has a well lit barrel filled with wine on it’s fine lees - check this out:

Looks like sand doesn’t it? Here’s our tasting table:

After our chat with Sabine we headed off to the majestic and impressive Pousse d’Or. Below is the Domaine.

It is simply beautiful.  The monopole vineyard of Clos d’Audignac is essentially it’s back yard. It’s amazing. They too suffered from the hail and frost of 2012 - look at this empty cellar.

The current winemaker at Pousse d’Or (who is also the owner) happens to be an engineer in his former life. He has created these “toppers” as he calls them for the barrels. They allow him to see what the wine is doing so to speak. It allows for witnessing activity in fermentation and rising and lowering of levels to see if you need to top off the barrels. They’re extremely progressive and just another sign of the high reasoning and thought behind the Pousse d’Or wines. Below are a few “toppers”.

Once again we hopped back into the car and headed to Savigny-les-Beaune and to Chandon de Briailles.  Claude de NIcholay Drouhin is the winemaker to the domaine. We had the pleasure of meeting up with her vineyard manager for a small tasting. Below is the estate and our tasting table. 

I can’t help it - I’m a sucker for a gorgeous home.

Inside the cellar we tasted 2011 and 2012 Savigny-les-Beaune (Aux Fourneaux up to Il de Vergelesses) and on to Corton Clos du Roi.  It was nothing short of fantastic to taste such well made reds as well as very precise whites. 

Lastly we took a final ride to Michel Ecard, also in Savigny-les-Beaune, to check out his slightly more rustic, much smaller (because Chandon de Briailles is already small) production Savigny “Serpentieres” and “Narbantons”. They were also quite delicious. Again the usual suspects of empty barrels and lower production. 

Okay.. I’m definitely ready for bed.  I’m signing off at 12:44 a.m. Beaune time and will pick up where I left off on Saturday perhaps. Same bat time, same bat channel. 

Thanks for escaping with me…

À Bientôt! Bonne Nuit! - lv

It couldn’t have been planned at a worse time, but nonetheless, I am in Beaujolais today and Burgundy for the rest of the week. I wanted to share what I’ve seen so far with you. Why, you ask? Because perhaps you can take your mind off recent events to let it wander a bit, perhaps a bit into Beaujolais. 

Today I got straight off a plane and then a train and then a car and landed in Beaujolais. A beautiful place, but more importantly I finally met Jean-Marc Burgaud. He makes my favorite Cru Beaujolais - Morgon Côte du Py. 

Here are a few interesting and beautiful photos of the Côte du Py and Jean-Marc’s head pruned old vine (48-60 years of age) beaujolais. 

Below is the Côte du Py and a beautiful cross resurrected there for a great harvest some almost hundred years ago by the previous grower. 

The gnarly and gorgeous old vine, head pruned beaujolais vines.

Jean-Marc shows us the inside of the rocks around the soil, noting the dark red clay composites.

And finally we taste and have some good conversation about Côte du Py and his two other cuvees from the Côte du Py  - James and Javernières. 

Jean-Marc and his family are lovely, hardworking folk. The wines are amazing. I am about to go to bed content and with new understanding. 

See you again tomorrow… in Burgundy. -lv

The last time I saw Italian actress Virna Lisi (above) she was having a wonderful time vamping it up as a reptilian Queen Catherine de Medici in the 1994 film adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas potboiler La Reine Margot.  The photo above I take to be from her 1965 Hollywood film, How to Murder Your Wife.  

The smile, the eye-contact, the raised glass - a trio of gestures instantly recognizable as a toast, comprise a ritual so intimately linked to wine drinking that its origins are shrouded in the mists of pre-history. What we can say for sure is that by the time something like a culture of wine can be discerned in the archaeological/ art history record, the toast has already assumed a character we recognize.

Consider the Assyrian prince above resplendent in his cornrows and intricately braided beard who seems as fully at home with the practice as Ms. Lisi.  The same lifted cup of wine and focused gaze; the hint, perhaps, of a smile. The juxtaposition of 1960’s Italian film star and ancient monarch is almost eerie - as if the millennia separating them had melted away and each were transfixed by the gaze of the other. “I’m about to drink,” this 8th century BCE royal seems to say. “You drink, too.”

So deeply imbued are we with the notion of the toast as a friendly gesture conveying good-will, esteem, even affection that it’s easy to lose sight of what was very likely responsible for the emergence of the practice in the first place: the danger associated with undisciplined social drinking.

The problem is apparent. In a group where the pace of drinking isn’t supervised a situation will quickly develop in which some are inebriated while others remain sober - a state in which those operating under the influence are at a distinct disadvantage.  For some to retain the full use of their wits even as others slid into oblivion posed a threat.

To address this risky situation we invented the regulated drinking party wherein the company indulges enthusiastically but reciprocally and symmetrically.  All drink together, glass for glass, at a measured pace that ensures both parity of blood-alcohol and a degree of safety for all involved. Drinking proceeds in rounds: As I drink; you drink, too.

It’s the essence of a toast to serve as a cue that a new round is about to go down and a call for everyone to participate in it.  To fail to join in was to be delinquent in observing the social drinking contract and risk falling outside the pale of civilized behavior. Only barbarians swilled wine as they pleased with no regard for due order or the direction provided by an experienced toastmaster.      

A toast is both a cue that a new round is about to to go down and a call for everyone to participate.

Participation in this ceremony was more than a signal that you were with the program, on the bus.  It was a pledge of full engagement, good-faith, and honest intention.  The practice proved very long-lived.  Until well into the 20th century it was common among all classes (at least in the West) to seal agreements and settle disputes with a shared drink.  In many societies this is still the norm. The deal wasn’t done (or the hatchet buried) until the glasses clinked.

But if the toast had to depend solely on its pacing or deal-making skills to justify its existence it would likely have long since been trundled off to the junkyard of discarded rituals. There’s another bit to be reckoned with. The lifted glass is traditionally accompanied by speech, often short and simple (Bottoms up!  Cin Cin!) but occasionally more elaborate - an apt quotation, a few lines of verse, perhaps even something approaching a mini oration.

One of the things a toast does better than almost anything else I can think of is give people an opportunity (excuse?) to say things they may be too shy to say in the ordinary course of things: the very simple but important things that may go unsaid for want of a situation where saying such things seems appropriate.

It’s why at our table we try to see that no drink goes down - be it ever so humble - without citing the occasion, noting an achievement, acknowledging a happiness (or, lacking one, wishing it into existence).  A toast is an invitation to acknowledge a success, share a hope, voice a commitment.  It’s an all-around lovely habit to cultivate, I think.  It’s certainly one that makes a strong connection to the generations of wine drinkers who have come before.

And if you’re feeling a little awkward or tongue-tied at first, remember that one of the things a glass of wine is there to do is lend its mystic aura of warmth, grace, and gravitas to whatever we have to say .

I’ll clink to that.  How about you?

-Stephen Meuse

La Fraghe 2011
Bardolino, Italy

Matilde Poggio was born in 1962, the third of six children, and she grows grapes and makes wine in Cavaion Veronese, in the heart of the Bardolino production zone in the Veneto on the shores of Lake Garda.  Her first harvest was in 1984; prior to that year the grapes were sold to another winery.  Even as a young child she remembers hearing the conversations about vines and wine, and she can recall those Octobers, when she went right from school to harvesting the grapes.  “This world, marked by the changing of the seasons, has always fascinated me, and the desire slowly grew in me to become part of it, to contribute to it, to learn how to listen to the vineyard and to the land, to bring forth from them my own wines.” She had no ready-made furrow, and so she was able to experiment with grape varieties, training methods, and blends, with the result that she currently has 28 hectares of vineyard, planted mainly to the Corvina grape, with a little Rondinella.

The two grape varieties, Corvina and Rondinella, are vinified separately because “Corvina arrives 10 days before Rondinella.”  The maceration lasts some 7-8 days and coincides with the fermentation period.  The cap is managed daily, with a délestage in the morning and a pumpover in the evening.  After the wine is drawn off it goes through malolactic fermentation, which usually occurs in the following month, then the wine goes into stainless steel tanks, where it rests until spring, when it is bottled. 

Matilde’s Le Fraghe Bardolino is purple-ruby tinged with medium intensity and weight.  It speaks of springtime and the promise of sweet-sour cherries and blackberries, with some white pepper notes.  It’s elegant with soft tannins and a lovely balance between judicious acidity and full, savory flavors, characteristic of wines of this area.  It lingers on the finish.  Matilde shared that her wine is a tasty accompaniment to asparagus (grows rampant in the Veneto area), pasta fagiole, and bolito misto.

Sean Shesgreen’s scholarly paper “Wet Dogs and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for the New Millenium” is clever and entertaining enough to have been rejected by any self-respecting peer-reviewed journal. In it the former English professor describes the various ways in which wine writers have sought to describe and categorize wine over the last two centuries (wine-writing as we know it doesn’t really reach back much further than that).

For quite a long while critics were fond of categorizing wine along class lines (lots of references to fine breeding and inherited superiority); later they turned to gender talk. To get a taste of this, rent a copy of Hugh Johnson’s video series “Vintage: The Story of Wine” and watch him, sometime in the 1970’s or 80’s, struggling to explain to an auditorium full of Japanese that Bordeaux is a masculine wine and Burgundy a feminine one.  His listeners don’t seem to be grasping the concept.

My guess is you won’t either.  Even in our present state of quasi-enlightenment about gender issues this kind of facile analogizing doesn’t go down very well and it’s not hard to understand why.  Such categorizing requires a bulky set of shared assumptions about what constitutes maleness and femalenesss - something on which there’s no longer much consensus.

It’s also painfully clear that describing one kind of wine as having masculine traits and another as having feminine traits is absurdly fanciful (not to mention rankly sexist) and that any assertion that there is a kind of wine that appeals primarily to women (for example) as opposed to men, is readily falsifiable.

It’s not by virtue of being masculine or feminine that wines are gendered.

But I will say this for Hugh - his instincts were on target.  Things that are habitually paired as counterparts/complements/antagonists of each other eventually take on characteristics that begin to feel like gender - and on this basis there is justification for seeing things that behave this way as functionally gendered.  In the world of wine there isn’t anything that fits this description more perfectly than the elemental binary pairing: red and white.

To be gendered in any meaningful way (as the citation at the top of this piece suggests), subjects must first exhibit obvious physiological and biological differences that have their source in nature.  We’re off to a good start.  Red (or black, if you prefer) grapes have heavily pigmented skins rich in the flavonoids that give red wine dark colors and tactile complexity. Winemakers extract these compounds by fermenting whole, crushed fruit together in a vat, pressing the mass and running off the juice only when they’re satisfied they’ve appropriated all the pigment and tannin they need.

White grapes, for all their charm, are not endowed with the same concentrations of these organic chemicals and are, with rare exception, always pressed before fermentation — the juice being run off the skins before it can take up much in the way of color or texture.

It’s not obvious why it became the norm for red and white grapes not to be fermented in the same way, or even why we gave up fermenting them all together as we surely must once have done.  What we can say with certainty is that by treating red and white grapes separately and differently in the cellar we exaggerate the natural physiological differences, making them more markedly oppositional than they would otherwise be. In the gendering game, culture takes its cue from nature then runs off with it; riffs on it; improvises; goes nuts.

Isn’t the first thing you note about a wine its redness or whiteness?

From the beginning color seems to have been a trigger for associating red wine with muscle meat, the heart (and thus the passions), and a sanguine complexion. In the same way, the longstanding relationship white wine has enjoyed with pale flesh — veal, pork, chicken, fish — surely has something to do with the shared lack of coloration.

Humeral theory, which governed medical theorizing from Hippocrates to Pasteur, associates red wine with blood and white wine with phlegm. Is it any surprise then that the Dutch with their phlegmatic temperaments have always been white wine drinkers, right down to the ugni blanc in their beloved Cognac?

Winemakers, restaurateurs, retailers and consumers are all complicit in the gendering of wine. Red and white grapes aren’t just created differently, they’re treated differently in the winery, on the shelf, and at the table. Routinely sourced from separate vineyards, they’re subjected to divergent elevages. In retail shops, they occupy separate shelves. 

At table they’re subjected to a clear division of labor, with white wines relegated to aperitif duty and assigned to accompany one set of dishes, while red wines are assigned to another. 

The expectation is that each will be good at different things. We mull over a dish or a menu to decide which is the most suitable accompaniment.  When guests are en route we consider whether so and so is a red or white wine person.

Though many of us are happy to drink both, we give careful thought to what’s appropriate at a given moment.  We segregate them in the wine cellar; we employ different stemware depending on which we intend to pour. Honestly, isn’t the first thing you notice about a person his/her gender? Isn’t the first thing you note about a wine its redness or whiteness?

Like the more conventional sort of gender, the classification categories of red and white wine are often in flux, showing identities that are firm but deformable; stable but also mobile.  To mix or switch their roles can be as jarring as the sight of a bearded lady or as much fun as a scene from Tootsie.

It’s not by virtue of being masculine or feminine that wines are gendered. It’s by virtue of being red or white.  The effect, however, is much the same: Vive la différence.

-Stephen Meuse 

I was on a road trip last week through the deep south.  It was an eye-opener for me to realize how readily southerners pegged me for someone not like them. It wasn’t just the Boston in my speech, apparently, but some complex of factors involving dress, manners, and mannerisms. Before any of them had spoken to me a group of guests at our B&B told my wife  they had decided I was a math professor.

Since I’ve never been good at or even interested in math and only agreed to come to work at Central Bottle when they assured me there would be no algebra, this tickled me.  Something was making me look like a math prof to these folks - but its not clear whether whatever made me look this way was something in me or something in them.

Can a wine make your butt look big?  It’s a question we ask ourselves at Central Bottle every day - not so much because we worry about the breadth of our posterior parts (although this is never far from our minds), but because we’ve all been around the drinks business long enough to know that a glass of gewurztraminer or frappato is never just a few ounces of something cheeringly fruity and alcoholic. Not a bit. Like all consumables, wine has semantic value - which is just another way of saying that we use it to make statements about who we think we are and how we would like to be perceived, regarded, and generally thought of by others. Maybe the wine at the B&B that day (the hosts were pouring a Rawson’s Retreat chardonnay) made my butt look mathematical.

In the arena of things that define us in our own eyes and others’ what we drink isn’t a big player like dress, speech patterns, and personal hygiene. It’s more like an accessory. But let’s not fool ourselves about just how powerful it can be in a minor role.  Just think about how James Bond’s vodka martini shaken, not stirred became a defining feature of one of the 20th century’s most recognizable personalities (you’ll want to click on that link).

Keen to impersonate a Master of the Universe-grade investment banker?  You’ll need to suit up in Armani and Rolex, but to really nail it you’d also need to order the resto’s last three bottles of Napa Valley cult cabernet at dinner that night - no matter the price.

Got an itch to go all Brooklyn on us?  You’ll need a lumberjack shirt and a good growth of Civil War-era facial hair for sure, but don’t neglect to bone up on single estate sherries and murky ribolla gialla from Slovenia, otherwise there’s a good chance you’ll give yourself away. Hipster is as hipster does.

Wine can make your butt look big (and mathy, too), but it can also make it look small, arty, athletic, super cool or convincingly square.

I’m pretty sure it’s just this that’s at the heart of the anxiety one encounters in a wine shop from time to time. Buyers want something pleasant to drink, but they’re wary of serving something that reflects a persona they aren’t comfortable inhabiting.  Will this wine make me look like a newbie; a poser; a snob; a geek?  Or will it project something more positive: urbanity; generosity; warmth; elegance; charm?

Wine helps us present ourselves as we wish to be seen. It helps others figure out who we are.  And if we occasionally worry that there’s some distance between who we are and who we’d like to be, remember that confidence is the key to convincing people (including ourselves) that we’re the same inside as out.

And confidence, as Jack Palance was fond of saying,  is very sexy.

-Stephen Meuse

Chateau Montauriol
Flambant Bulles Rouges
Fronton, France

Fronton is about as far south of Paris as one can be in France, but close your eyes and drink this funny, fizzy, flamboyant wine and what conjures up in your mind are images of the famous Moulin Rouge cancan girls, smoky cafes, and Paris nightlife in full swing.

Maybe that’s what Nicolas Gelis was striving for when he decided to partially ferment Négrette with Syrah and create this festive and utterly distinct, naturally effervescent wine. Négrette is the unique specialty of the vineyards north of Toulouse in South West France and wines made from the grape are supple, perfumed and flirtatious with a slightly animal flavor, and are best drunk young. This bubbly walks the tightrope between bright, fresh, sweet, red berry fruit, and heady geranium and herby aromas with heavy undertones of smokiness, reminding us of Lapsang Souchong tea (where the leaves are dried over pinewood smoke.)

Like Stravinsky and Duchamp before him, Gelis is simply manipulating the familiar to express something new. Enjoy with friends!

In a post at The Atlantic, Brandeis historian Yoni Applebaum has speculated on why sweet wines are favored for Passover. He tells an intriguing story involving homemade (or at least locally-produced) raisin wine and the gradual emergence of the native Concord variety as the grape of choice for a series of New York wineries catering to the U.S. market for kosher wine. An advertising slogan once touted the Mogen David brand as, “wine like Grandma used to make.”

Applebaum’s piece is delightful reading, but I doubt he’s provided a satisfactory answer to the key question he poses: namely, why these wines were from the beginning made in a sweet style.

My guess is you have reach much further back to find the sources of a persistent preference for high levels of alcohol and residual sugar in Jewish ceremonial wine; back to early Iron Age kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean where both the climate favored the development of super-ripe grapes and where primitive winemaking techniques guaranteed their sugars would never be fermented to dryness.

Since wild yeasts have only a limited tolerance for high levels of alcohol and these levels rise as fermentation advances, yeast activity grinds to a halt leaving some sugars in the wine.  As a result, all luxury wines in the ancient eastern Mediterranean were both (relatively) high in alcohol and sweet with residual sugar.

It’s observable that things set apart for religious and ceremonial use tend to cling to their ancient forms. Examples of this include the anachronistic use of robes instead of suits, scrolls instead of books, and archaic languages in place of living ones.  It seems reasonable that something like this is in play with respect to wine.  Even as notions of fine wine evolved toward drier, more austere models, wines for ceremonial use tended to retain their original, archaic character.

In fact, there’s no reason to assume that Concord grapes can’t be vinified to dryness. And it’s clear that there are many options for fully dry, European-style Kosher wines today. If a preference for sweet wines at Passover seems loath to go away, we may well have to look back to the time of King David — rather than Mogen David — to know why.

-Stephen Meuse