According to a report published by the Israeli daily Haaretz on Wednesday, Israel’s Chief Rabbinate has declared that carciofi alla giudia, “Jewish-style” artichokes, are traif or unkosher.

“A few months ago,” writes reporter Davide Lerner, “Israel’s Rabbinate banned imports of a ready-made version of the dish, ordering its immediate removal from shelves.”

The issue, according to the report, is that artichoke leaves may contain insects that are impossible to remove before cooking.

The consumption of insects is strictly forbidden by Jewish law.

A “common problem with vegetables,” write the editors of Chabad.org (a leading English-language resource for explanations of Jewish traditions and law, including dietary laws), “involves possible insect infestation. The prohibition against consuming insects, even very tiny ones — as long as they are visible to the naked eye — is mentioned five times in the Torah and is very strict.”

“Some particularly severe problem vegetables are artichokes, asparagus, brussel [sic] sprouts, cauliflower, and leafy vegetables.”

Here’s what the Rabbinate’s Import Division head, Rabbi Yitzhak Arazi, had to say, as quoted by Haaretz: “The heart of the artichoke is full of worms, there is no way you can clean it. It cannot be kosher… This is not our policy, this is Jewish religious law.”

It’s not clear what prompted the Rabbinate to reconsider this dish (above), which traces its roots to the Renaissance and beyond.

One of the most popular foods served in Rome’s historic ghetto, carciofi alla giudia are made by flattening the artichoke buds and then frying them in olive oil until tender. The artichoke was prized by ancient Romans and modern Romans still flock to the Jewish quarter to enjoy Jewish-style artichokes (not to be confused with Roman-style carciofi alla romana).

I have eaten the dish in Rome many times but have never seen the “ready-made” kind. I was able to find this version in a jar online. But canning or jarring the dish would seem to defeat the recipe’s essence: the delight is delivered by the delicate crunch of the gently bitter leaves balanced by the sweetness and tingling sensation produced by the thistle’s heart.

The Rabbinate’s ruling seems to apply to pre-packaged carciofi alla romana and it remains unclear whether or not the made-to-order version will also be deemed traif.

Lerner writes:

Removing the signature dish from a restaurant renowned for its Roman-Jewish cuisine led to some awkward conversations between customers puzzled at not finding it on the menu and embarrassed hosts. When the restaurant manager negotiated a revised version of carciofi alla giudia being on the menu, disappointed restaurant patrons commented that it was not the same.

Read the Haaretz article here (accessible for free if you register with the site).

Jews across the world are known for their love of wordplay. And the piece in the English-language Haaretz inspired some true nuggets:

“Artichoke on this” (the title of the article).
“It breaks one’s [artichoke] heart” (a comment).

Special thanks to the inimitable Francesco Bonfio for bringing this story to my attention.

Image via seventyoneplace’s Flickr (Creative Commons).

“Sugar War Reignites in Europe” read the title of an article published last month by Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s leading financial daily.

The paper was among the first to report on negotiations that took place in March between the European alcoholic beverage lobby and the European Commission.

According to a post published the following week by Reuters, “Europe’s drinks sector announced plans [in March] to inform consumers more about the energy content and ingredients in beer, wine and spirits in a self-policing move, but critics said much of this information would only be available online.”

But the inclusion of sugar as an ingredient and how ingredients will be listed remain a contentious issue. According to the Italian report, northern European wine growers (German, Austria, France) insist that sugar, even when added to boost alcohol content (a process known as chaptalization), is not an ingredient because the sugar is transformed into alcohol. Mediterranean growers, on the other hand, want sugar to be included.

Chaptalization is legal in the EU although it is forbidden in Italy. But some believe, as the author of the Sole 24 Ore piece notes, the practice is still employed illicitly. Some readers may be old enough to remember the chaptalization scandal that emerged in Piedmont in the early 1980s, involving one of the region’s most prominent winemakers.

The Sole 24 Ore article includes a quote from Roberto Moncalvo, president of Coldiretti, Italy’s national federation of food growers, one of the country’s most powerful food and wine advocacy groups.

“We need to expose the addition of sugar on wine labels,” he told the paper.

“The revision of labeling norms, including nutritional values and ingredients, needs to be adopted in order to allow consumers to know, finally, if the wine they are drinking was produced with the addition of sugar. Hiding this information misleads consumers and creates unfair competition for producers who don’t resort to sugaring [chaptalization].”

As the Reuters piece notes, the EU’s alcoholic beverage sector has agreed to draft and implement new labeling guidelines. But it’s not clear that northern and Mediterranean countries will agree on how (and where, whether or the label itself or online via QR code) sugar will be listed as an ingredient.

Image via Uwe Hermann’s Flickr (Creative Commons).

When I finally got home to sit down to dinner with Tracie last night around half past eight, it felt like I had traveled around the (wine) world and back.

In the afternoon, I attended a superb guided tasting of 12 jaw-dropping wines from the West Sonoma Coast Vintners association.

The brightest and the best of Houston’s wine scene were all seated at the standing-room-only event.

And the speakers, each of them leading winemakers from this aspiring American appellation (they are currently petitioning for the creation of their own designation), delivered a fantastic overview of the would-be AVA’s sub-zones, macro-climates, soil types, and winemaking styles. It was followed by a walk-around tasting of labels from eight different wineries, including 40+ wines.

Wow, what a great event! And it was amazing to finally hear Ted Lemon of Littorai speak. His wines are as compelling as the thoughtfulness and brilliance that go into his winemaking.

Gros Ventre (above) was a highlight for me as well. Great wines and great to chat with winemaker and grower Chris Pittenger.

I was wholly impressed by the caliber of the event and the tenor of the conversation and tasting.

Thank you for coming to Texas, West Sonoma Coast Vintners!

By late afternoon, I was seated with one of the coolest people in the Italian wine world today, Tony Apostolakos, U.S. sales director for Masi in Valpolicella.

We had sat down together to taste through a flight of Masi’s current releases.

But that wasn’t going to happen before we enjoyed a glass of Assyrtiko and Moschofilero at Helen, Houston’s celebrated Greek-modern restaurant where wine director Evan Turner runs one of the top two Greek wine programs in the country (the other imho is Molyvos in New York).

I really love the breadth and range of Masi’s wines but it was the 2009 Amarone della Valpolicella Classico Campolongo di Torbe (above) that really sang to me. What a fantastic wine and what a great tasting — each one of these bottles a gem.

Thanks, Tony, for coming back to Houston!

By the time I swung by one of my favorite wine shops, Vinology around the corner from Helen, to pick up a bottle of 2016 Zahel Orangetraube Orange T from Vienna on my way home, it just felt like I had been around the globe — from the edge of the western wine world to its heart and back… all in a workaday’s dawn-to-dark in my city on the bayou.

“Italian immigrants made sure Barbera had a home in California,” wrote José Vouillamoz in Wine Grapes (Ecco 2012).

“It has proved more popular than the noble Nebbiolo in [the state] with older vines in the Sierra Foothills proving particularly successful. The variety [also] benefited from the Cal-Ital vogue.”

In 2008, California growers had “more than 17,300 acres/7,000” planted to Barbera according to the ampelographer.

These notes from Vouillamoz’s Barbera entry recently came into sharper focus when I stumbled on a text that left me scratching my head and wondering: had Prohibition not disrupted the immense and immensely lucrative popularity of Californian Barbera in the early 1900s, would we be drinking Napa Valley Barbera instead of Napa Valley Cab today?

In the course of my research for a new blogging project I’m working on, “An American in Barbera,” I came across a 1910 petition submitted to the California Supreme Court, asking for an injunction in trademark litigation between Italian Swiss Colony (the plaintiff) and Italian Vineyard Co. (the defendant).

The latter was infringing on the former’s trademark, according to the complaint. Italian Swiss Colony was hoping to stop Italian Vineyard Co. from labeling its wines with the trademark “tipo” indicating the type or category of wine. And here’s where it gets really interesting.

Among the “types” of wine that the two estates were growing and bottling at the time (for more than 10 years at least, according to the document), “the defendant has been manufacturing wines having characteristics similar to those of other Italian wines, to wit [sic], those known as ‘Barbera,’ ‘Puglia,’ and ‘Gragnano’ — and has branded and marked them as ‘Tipo Barbera,’ ‘Tipo Puglia,’ and ‘Tipo Gragnano,’ in order to indicate that its said wines were respectively, of the type of the said Italian wines.”

Wow… and WOW!

There is a lot of juicy information (excuse the pun) loaded in this passage. It gives us glimpse of how Californian and Italian wines were marketed and perceived at the time (at least 10 years before Prohibition was implemented in 1920) and it also offers an indication of Barbera’s stature among the great grape varieties of the world at the turn of the century.

I wrote about my discovery today in a post for the Barbera d’Asti growers association collaborative writing project: My Name Is Barbera.

Please check it out. You might be surprised by my findings.

And please stay tuned: just wait until I publish my post on the origins of the ampelonym and piss everyone off!

Joking aside, I’ve really been enjoying the series, which will continue through early 2019.

Thanks for reading!

Image via My Name Is Barbera.

It’s that time of year again when people begin wondering and asking about wine pairings for Easter and Passover.

The two holidays overlap this year, with Erev Pesach (the first night of the Passover) falling on Good Friday. But even though lamb can be the one common denominator for Easter brunch or lunch and the Passover Seder, the traditional foods for the two holidays don’t have much in common.

At my in-laws’ place, for example, spiral ham is the star of the Easter meal. At my brothers’ Passover Seder, my mother’s brisket (like the one above) will be the main attraction.

Across the internets (and across the years that consumers in America have become more wine savvy), I see countless wine writers recommending “dry” and “bone dry” wines for things like gefilte fish (traditionally served by Ashkenazi Jews on Passover even though, like the brisket, it has nothing to do with the Passover story or the symbolic meal).

Historically, my forbears drank sweet wines with their Passover meal. That’s partly because sweet wines were much more popular in my grandparents’ day. And it’s also because of a cultural continuity with the Austro-Hungarian food hegemony of Mitteleuropa. Can you imagine someone in Vienna or Berlin serving a dry wine with their gefilte fish (quenelles de brochet) in the first decade of the 20th century (when my great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S.)?

(It’s important to remember that people like my grandparents actually didn’t drink wine on a regular basis. But they had to serve wine during the Passover because the Seder meal isn’t complete with out it.)

Similarly, my wife’s family served and drank sweet wines (when/if they opened wine) at holiday meals. Sweet wine is still very popular in Texas and across the south. And so when we share holiday meal on the Louisiana border where my wife Tracie grew up, I always bring along some German Riesling and the occasional Quarts de Chaume.

The above wines work gloriously with the salty-sweet spiral ham. And frankly, they work great with gefilte fish, too!

This year I won’t be bringing too much sweet wine to the table (although I will bring some). Instead, I’ve decided to abandon the “sweet vs. dry” dialectic and embrace a totally different approach: the number-one criterion for my wine selection will be ripeness. And when I say ripeness, I mean the sweetness of bright ripe fruit flavors in the wine and not the sweetness obtained from residual sugar in wines like German-style Riesling and from the topping off of sparkling wines like Champagne and Prosecco, for example.

And while European wines aren’t excluded from my shopping list, it’s the new world ripeness that I’m looking for. Right now, my top pick for both tables is the Qupé Chardonnay Y-Block from Santa Barbara County. We currently have the 2015 in our market here in Texas: the wine is showing great right now (despite being last year’s release) and the price is perfect for the occasion ($15-20 depending on the market/state you live in).

Whether white or red (and I’m still working on my red pick), ripe fruit character works well across the spectrum of flavors at the Jewish and Christian holidays. And the sweet fruit in the wines works wonderfully with the saltiness of the gefilte fish and the spiral ham (my mouth is watering right now thinking of both!).

It’s important to remember that all wine has residual sugar in it. Even a bottle of Barbaresco, for example, has about two grams of sugar per liter of wine. That sugar doesn’t come from a topping off (a dosage or liqueur d’expédition). That sugar comes from the natural sugar in the grape itself.

Similarly, even a “bone dry” pas dosé or zero dosage Champagne or Franciacorta, for example, can have and probably does have up to three grams of residual sugar. It’s extremely rare to find sparkling wine that doesn’t have any residual sugar at all. And there’s a reason for that: you wouldn’t want to drink it otherwise.

My advice for this year’s selection is abandon the “sweet vs. dry” false narrative and look for ripeness of fruit that will harmonize with the food and have an appeal for a wider range of wine lovers (and not just connoisseurs who think dry is better).

That’s what I’m shooting for this year. We’ll see how it works out!

Looking for Kosher wine for your Seder? Check out this piece on “kosher-for-Passover” wines I wrote last year for the Houston Press.