Two weeks ago I returned home from The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, held at the Meadowood Napa in St. Helena the week prior to Premiere Napa Valley. I’m still not sure what I was doing there, but no one kicked me out and I sure wasn’t going to say anything.
12/19/11: The first lot to go HOT, it is also the first lot to receive a bid at the reserve....
For Israeli wines, “kosher” is a blessing and a curse. Israel right now is one of the most exciting wine countries in the world. The country made almost exclusively bad sweet wine for its first 50 years, but now it’s like California of the 1970s, in a period of rapid growth and experimentation and great increases in quality. But the kosher marketing conundrum hangs over everything: how to sell Israeli wines, kosher or not, to non-Jews, a necessity if the industry is to sustain its present growth.