Posted at 16:22h in Wineries by 1 Comment
It’s no secret to readers of this blog that one of my favorite wineries is the Galil Mountain Winery (not, as my tour guide kept on annoyingly referring to it as the Mt. Galilee Winery). Owned by the vineyards (which also own the Golan Heights Winery) and Kibbutz Yiron, Galil Mountain makes some of the best value wines from Israel. In fact, because it’s a good wine at a good price, my wine of choice on Shabbat tends to be from the Galil Mountain Winery.
At their modern visitor center on Kibbutz Yiron, near the Lebanese border, we tasted, among other wines, the 2004 Yiron and Yiron Syrah. While they could use further cellaring, they were, of course, excellent. I’m a regular drinker of the “regular series” and find them excellent, albeit young and not overly complex, wines.
While at the winery, the tour includes not only a tasting (which was enjoyable, but since I was already familiar with the latest releases, it was more interesting to see others’ reactions … which I will discuss later), but also see the steel tanks and barrels, as there has been some debate over whether the Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 was in steel or oaks (the answer: steel with oak chips). I will write more later about what makes a wine kosher vs. not kosher, but one of the key things is that a wine is not considered kosher if it is touched (including the barrel, steel tank, or sealed bottle) by someone who is not a Sabbath-observant Jew. Hence, it was quite interesting to see a layer of plastic sheeting near some of the barrels that prevented it from being touched. Needless to say, however, that this obviously has nothing to do with the taste of the wine, which is why it is so frustrating to me that people see non-mevushal kosher wines as a category unto themselves and inferior, when there is absolutely no basis in truth to this libel.
