Kosher Wine For The Holidays

.
Moshe Yudkowsky an Orthodox Jew seems to be a wine connoisseur.

"The Jewish community in Europe used to drink wines like those I'm drinking today," Yudkowsky says, "but when Jews came to America, the Old World grapes weren't available."

Until 20 or 30 years ago, "everybody was drinking sweet malagas," Yudkowsky says. (These sticky, purple wines are made from American "Red Malaga" grapes. Even today, most Jews have scarcely ventured beyond those types.

Yudkowsky remembers the first time he tasted a wine that was different, in the late 1970s. "It was a Hagafen Riesling," he says, still a fairly sweet wine. That wine led to what Yudkowsky calls "a hobby that's out of control." He's been sampling and collecting kosher wines ever since.

Two years ago, he combined his worlds of technology, Judaism and wine to create the online Kosher Wine Review (www.kosherwinereview.com), a Web site detailing his rankings of strictly kosher wines. The site can sort the reviewed wines by criteria ranging from color to value, and also offers the ability to download the information to a Palm Pilot organizer.