Wrong Bottle, Right Night

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers, If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine, sit back, relax, and enjoy. If you've poured a bone-dry Cabernet for Kiddush every Friday night this year and felt a little virtuous about it, good. I've been that guy. This show has been that guy. The guy who says, respect the grape, taste for acid, ask where the vineyard is. Don't let a cartoon of kosher wine decide what ends up in your cup. Don't confuse sweetness with holiness or dryness with sophistication. Upgrade the Friday night bottle. Make the blessing taste like attention. If that was you this year, I see you. I'm not here to take that virtue away. But there is one night a year when the virtuous bottle can miss the assignment. Not because dry wine is wrong— dry wine is often exactly what Shabbat wants. It's that this night isn't asking for your smartest glass. This night is asking you For your most honest rehearsal of hope, think about what the calendar is already doing to your mouth before you ever open a bottle. Apple, honey, a round challah, a pomegranate split open on the counter. Three words: "Shana tova umtuka," a good and sweet year, spoken over food. That teaches the tongue to pray. The whole holiday is training your palate towards sweetness on purpose, while the book of life and death lie open, while the chauffeur is still humming somewhere in your ribs. So what does it mean if the cup argues with the honey? What does it mean if the table says umtuka and kiddush says? Prove you're sophisticated. I'm not saying you failed if your Cabernet is beautiful. I'm saying check the assignment. 2,500 years ago, on this exact day of the calendar, a governor stood in front of a crowd that was weeping. Really weeping. The way you weep when you finally understand what you've done. And he did not tell them to cry harder. He gave them a menu: Eat the rich food, drink the sweet drinks, send a portion to whoever has nothing prepared. Don't grieve, because the joy of Hashem is your strength. Ishtu mam takim, drink sweet drinks. That's not a wine marketing line. It's a verse, and it's the spine of tonight's episode. On Rosh Hashanah, serious sweet wine is not a nostalgia tax, and it's not a kosher stereotype. It is that verse made liquid, because sweetness is how a judged people rehearses hope. Everything else tonight— the shopping carts, A frozen press on the Golan. A 3-glass ladder from nostalgia to spine. Apple and honey and portions sent next door is method and midrash in service of that one sentence. I'm Simon Jacob. This is the Kosher Terroir, Season 4, Episode 41. Wrong bottle, right night. Tonight the wine geek loses on purpose, and we're going to make sure sweetness wins with spine, not syrup. Shalom, my friends. I'm speaking to you tonight from Bergenfield, New Jersey, 10 minutes from the busiest kosher wine aisles in America this week. A wine lover who dabbles with With his whole heart and buys ice by the bag, and this is the kosher terroir. If you're hearing this the first week of September 2026, you already know what your calendar looks like, even if you haven't yet opened a luach. Rosh Hashanah 5787 begins at sunset this Friday, September 11th. It runs through nightfall Sunday the 13th. Monday is the fast of Gedaliah, and Yom Kippur arrives at sunset on the 20th, followed less than a week later by Sukkot. Which means, and I say this with love and with a little urgency that smells like yeast and packing tape, you are buying bottles of wine this week. The shopping carts are filling. The family's WhatsApp threads are already arguing about who brings the fish, who brings the honey cake, and who is on wine. And somebody— every family has one— has already typed in all caps, DON'T FORGET THE SWEET ONE. Last week we were inside the temple's incense recipe. Tonight, we come down from the altar to the cup on the table. Let me tell you what we will not do tonight. We will not pick a fight with Grandma's Concord. We will not reopen the Mevushal debate. What we will do is honor nostalgia where it belongs, and then ask residual sugar to grow up. To show acid, to show chill, to show intention, so that sweetness can do the job it was given on a holy day when weeping was the first honest response. If you're new here, welcome. This show is for people who take Jewish life seriously and take wine seriously, without becoming snobs about either. A host who will quote the Book of Dehemia in one breath and tell you to put the bottle in a nice bucket like you mean it in the next. If you've been with us since the summer heresies, since Mavushal is not spoiled, since last week's incense, thank you. The High Holidays taste better when the cup has a story. And the story has acid. One framing note before we open the scroll. This episode is not Sweet Wine Is Secretly Always Best. This episode is Calendar Theology. There are nights for dry precision. There are nights for patio heresies and ice cubes and no apologies. And there is one night when the tradition itself leans towards sweetness. And the job of wine education is not to scold that lean, it is to equip it. So let's go stand in a crowd that is crying. Picture Jerusalem in the early Second Temple period. Not a postcard, not the gold, light, untidy stones. The work site, walls rising, markets half rebuilt, a people back from exile, still figuring out how to be a people again, with calloused hands and a memory of foreign cities. It's the first day of the 7th month, biblical Rosh Hashanah, Yom Teruah, the day Of the sounding. The crowd gathers at the Water Gate. Ezra, the scribe, brings out the scroll. From first light until midday, he reads. And the Livyim moving through the crowd, giving a sense of it, not just the music of a sacred language, but the meaning. And when the people finally understand what they're hearing, They weep. They weep because Torah made their failure audible. That's what clarity does. Clarity doesn't always arrive as comfort. Sometimes it lands in the chest like a verdict. Sometimes the first fruit of understanding is grief. And then the leadership does something that startles me every single year. Every year I read it. Every year I teach it at a table. Every year I catch myself wanting the Amim Noraim to be only solemn. Nehemia the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, the Levi'im who had been teaching—they interrupt the mourning. They don't say cry harder. Maybe God will notice. They don't say cancel dinner. This is too serious for joy. They don't spiritualize starvation. They say this day is holy. Do not mourn. Do not weep. Hold that. Holiness in this sense is not performed by extending the tears. Holiness is redirected. Towards the table. And then comes the verse this whole episode hangs on. The Book of Nehemia, chapter 8. I'll give it to you in the classic old Sonsino cadence, the one that still sings in the bone. Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto him For whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy unto the Lord. Neither be you grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. In Hebrew, the sweet clause lands as two words: "שתו ממתקים" drink sweet things. "ממתקים" sweetness plural of the drinking kind. The same root shows up once more in the Tanakh, in Shir Hashirim. This mouth is mamtakim. This mouth is sweetness. But here it's festive drink language paired with rich, choice fatty foods. Eat the rich, drink the sweet, send portions to the one Who has nothing prepared? Don't grieve, because Chedvat Hashem, the joy of Hashem, is your stronghold, your refuge, your fortification for the road ahead. Now I'm not going to do what wine writers love to do with this verse. I'm not claiming that Nehemiah poured Gwertströmer. I'm not smuggling a Golan text sheet into the Persian-period Jerusalem. I'm also not pretending the verse is a lab report with residual sugar in grams per liter. The verse is a command to festive sweetness, as the grammar of a holiday after the tearful hearing of Torah. In our world, Quality sweet wine is one of the best instruments the Jewish table owns for that posture. Instrument, not proof text for a grape. Please hear the difference. The thesis survives without forcing the Hebrew to do marketing work it never signed up for. Stay in the scene one more breath. The people had been weeping. Leadership says, holiness here is enacted at the table. Eat, drink sweet, send portions. Don't grieve, because joy is strength. That is the paradox that makes Rosh Hashanah taste like itself. We are judged. The books are open. There is no halal on this festival. The king is seated in judgment, and the Talmud remembers why. And still, the table happens. Still, the cup is raised. Sweetness is not denial. Sweetness is how a judged people keeps walking. Rav Eliezer Melamed, in his famous book on halacha, expresses the spirit of Ezra-Nehemiah In 2 words: repent and rejoice. God wants return, not despair dressed up as punishment. Joy is not the opposite of teshuvah. Joy is what keeps teshuvah from collapsing into theater. And please don't skip how the chapter ends, because the verse doesn't. The Levi'im hush the crowd. The people go, they eat, they drink, they send portions, and the text says there is great rejoicing. And then the reason: because they understood the words that were declared to them. Understanding produced a feast, not tears. That is liturgy with the digestive system. That is theology You can plate. I'll tell you when I first understood that verse with my mouth instead of my eyes. It was Rosh Hashanah years ago, at a table where the year behind us had not been kind, and everyone around it knew it. The person making kiddush didn't reach for the serious bottle that night. He reached for something sweet Cold, aromatic, a half bottle that had been waiting in the back of the fridge, and he poured it into everybody's glass, even the ones who don't really drink. But I watched shoulders come down. I watched somebody who had cried that afternoon laugh at the second sip, and I remember thinking, That isn't sugar. That's ma'oz. That's strength. Like ma'utzur, strength. You can swallow. Now a light brush of halacha, one paragraph, and then we leave the shelf and go to the shops. The Rama in Or HaChaim, in the laws of Rosh Hashanah, records the instinct directly. Fatty meat, sweet things, apple dipped in honey. Customs that aimed at a sweet and abundant year, rooted in that older Nehemia reflects that festive richness belongs to this day. And in the same section of the Shulchan Aruch, it says, we eat, we drink, we rejoice on Rosh Hashanah. We do not fast, but we do not eat to the point of being satiated, so that the head stays clear and the awe of heaven stays on the face. Commanded joy with a restrained head. Remember that phrase. It's why later, when we pour dessert wine, I'm going to ask for an ice-cold service. And smaller pours. Hope towards a future, but not a party that forgets the king. That's enough halacha. We're not turning this into a shiur on the halacha of why we don't fast. We're learning why the cup is allowed to be sweet, and why sweetness still has to behave like a grown-up at this table. So who this week is buying? If Nehemia wrote the theology, the shopping carts write the folk practice. Walk into a wine shop in Teaneck this week, or Jerusalem, or Golder's Green, or the kosher aisle of a supermarket that seems to have doubled overnight, and you can feel the pulse. People who buy one bottle a month are buying 4. People who don't really drink are asking for something nice for the in-laws. And people who reach for the same Cabernet every Friday are hovering, a little embarrassed, in front of white wines with German-sounding names, gold stickers, and the word dessert in small print. The dean of the Israeli wine writers, And a man who has been standing in this aisle longer than most of the wineries in it published his Rosh Hashanah piece in the Jerusalem Post on September 5th. The headline is Eat Well, Drink Well, and he says out loud what everyone in the Israeli trade feels in their bones: Rosh Hashanah rivals Pesach. is the wine-buying peak of the year. Big family meals, reunions that are as much about seeing each other as about the menu. Wine at the center. People want something special. The budgets differ— 50 shekels, 100 shekels, or more than you'd admit in a group chat— but the impulse is shared. I'm not going to read you the whole shopping list. Open the article. The link is in the show notes. Budget tier, wine lovers tier, prestige tier, rosés and cabernets and metals, whites for heat or fish, the whole map. But I want to mention specifically 2 bottles from the list in particular because they prove the culture already knows What we're talking about when we say sweetness belongs. The first is Heyotzer's Sketch Gortz Tremener, 2024. Montefiori files it under value and says the quiet family truth out loud: it's always wise to have a semi-dry wine on the festival table, because there will always be someone in the family who appreciates it. Aromatic Gewürztraminer from the Lower Galilee. Those who like a touch of sweetness will love this. No speech required. No conversion experience. Just a glass that doesn't argue with the honey. Second is Tepperberg's Inspire Gewürztraminer, 2024. He calls it a beautiful dessert wine. Luscious, delicious, and then he gives the service instructions every serious sweet wine needs and every flabby sweet wine fears. Serve it cold. Perfect, he says, for the traditional Rosh Hashanah starters, for fruit desserts, or to sip after dinner. A big family winery that keeps showing up when when the holiday table needs something that tastes like intention. Notice what he did not have to invent. Nobody needed a marketing department to create an appetite for sweet on this holiday. The holiday already carries matukah in its mouth: apple, honey, round challah. The market is catching up to Nehemia. Or maybe the market never forgot. And it was the wine educators who did, in our hurry to drag kosher wine into sophistication. And one thing I want to get exactly right, because we're wine people: Montefiore's Rosh Hashanah advice, over the years, goes further than a semi-dry on the side. Year-round, he often prefers dry wine for Kiddush. The upgrade story most of us tell. Rosh Hashanah is the night he actually recommends sweet for Kiddush, aligned with the apple and honey and the wish for a sweet year. And in those older columns, he has pointed people towards serious dessert wines, famously including one from the Golan we'll spend real time with in a few minutes. I'm naming that one tonight as a craft benchmark from the winery's own documented method and from the longer thread of his advice, not as a bottle in the September 5th piece. This week's dessert star on his list is the Zeppelberg Inspire. Categories matter. Accuracy is a kind of kashrut. He closes the piece the way we'd close it: Shana Tova Umtuka, and put Israel at the center of your table. I'll second that without turning into a commercial. If you're listening in Brooklyn, or London, or Johannesburg, or Los Angeles, an Israeli bottle on the Rosh Hashanah table is not nationalism cosplay. It's Terroir hospitality. It's saying the land that grew the language of the Simanim can also grow the cup that rhymes with them. I'll tell you what I saw on West Englewood Avenue this week. A man about my age, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, holding a dessert Gwertz in one hand and a big Cabernet in the other. and turning them both over, like he was checking for a hexer that would tell him which one his mother-in-law would approve. I wanted to walk over and say, sir, you're allowed both. That's the episode. 2 bottles. Peace in the family. The shops fill this week because people already sense that sweetness belongs. Our job is to name why. Liturgy, not surrender. And then to help sweetness arrive with spine, so the wish for a sweet year doesn't taste like a sugar crash by 10 PM. Which brings us to the cartoon and to the freezer on the Golan. Let's name the prejudice gently, because mocking people's grandparents is a cheap way to to sound sophisticated, and this show does not do cheap. For most of the world, kosher wine still means one cartoon: thick, sweet, red, served too warm, poured too freely, forgiven because it's tradition, laughed at by people who think their Pinot option is a personality. Some of that cartoon was earned by industrial history and limited options. Some of it was projected by tasters who never bothered with the last 30 years of Israeli or kosher worldcraft. Either way, this show has spent a lot of episodes helping Jews climb out of it. So, why am I defending sweet wine tonight? Because the cartoon collapses all sweetness into one flabby category. And And that is a tasting error as much as a cultural one. It's like saying every piece of music in a minor key is elevator music. It's like saying all honey is the same jar. It's lazy, and laziness is a poor substitute for terroir. So here's the ladder. Just 3 rungs. You can climb it at the shop without becoming a snob. The everyday nostalgic sweet Concord Classic Sacramento. The bottle that tastes like Hebrew school and Uncle Mo's jokes and the plastic tablecloth that stuck to your elbows. I'm not here to cancel it. If that is the only wine that makes your elderly aunt say amen with her whole face Put it on the table with honor, and put a second bottle next to it. Honor, then invite. Tonight's thesis rejects syrup as default. It does not reject family love as sin. So next, rung two: the semi-sweet aromatic, the sketch tier. Gorts Traminer. With a touch of residual sugar, perfume without syrup, a suggestion of lychee, floral lift. The person at every table who doesn't like dry wine finally gets a glass that isn't a cartoon and isn't a lecture. That's hospitality intelligence. That's knowing your guests. Then rung 3, dessert wine with spine. Concentration, aroma, acid, length, ice-cold service. The Tepperberg Inspire is this week's accessible pick at that rung. And the craft benchmark, the bottle I promised you in chapter 2, is Yarden Heights Wine from the Golan Heights Winery. Let me tell you the Heights Wine story properly, because this is where sweet stops being a mood and becomes a method. And method is how we escape stereotype. The name is a bilingual pun that writes itself: Golan Heights plus Icewine. It's 100% Gewürztraminer from the cool northern Golan, handpicked, very ripe, from vineyards The winery certifies as sustainably farmed. Now, classic ice wine, from Canada or Mosel, depends on a real vineyard freeze. The berries freeze on the vine, in the dark, in December, and the pickers go out at 4 in the morning, with their fingers hurting. Israel doesn't reliably get that night. The Golan gets snow, but not on schedule, and not at the sugar levels you need. So the winery doesn't wait for a miracle frost that may not come. They make one. Cryo-extraction. Whole clusters are brought into the winery and held for about a month At roughly -12 Celsius. Call it 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Think about that. A whole month. Not a gimmick blast chilled for Instagram. A slow cold that quietly rewrites the physics of the berry. Then the clusters are pressed while still frozen. The water stays behind As ice in the press. What runs out is everything else: sugar, acid, flavor compounds, the aromatic soul of Reibgurtstraminer. Fermentation crawls along over several months, and in the bottle, the wine has a long life. The winery talks about excellent drinking a decade or more from vintage. Sliding from lychee and apricot into marmalade as it ages. Half bottles mostly, because dessert wine is concentrated speech. You don't always need the full novel on the table. Now, what does concentration actually do? It raises sugar. Yes, anyone can raise sugar. You can raise sugar with a bag from the supermarket. It also raises aromatic intensity— lychees, apricots, flowers, spice, apple, kumquat— in the winery's own sensory language. And it forces the question of acid, because if you concentrate without acid, you get candy. With a cork. If you concentrate with acid, you get length. You get a finish that keeps talking after the sip. You get sweetness you can think with and contemplate. You get hope that doesn't cloy. I'm not going to read you the lab sheet between the fish and the soup. Look at one if you like. The winery publishes them. And you'll see a wine that carries its sugar on real acidity at moderate alcohol. But I'm asking you to hear the principle so clearly that you could say it over candlelight. Sweetness without acidity is nostalgia syrup. Sweetness with acidity and chill is hope you can finish. Write it on a sticky note. Put it on the fridge next to the honey. And the next time someone says, "I don't like sweet wine," ask them gently whether they've ever had sweet wine that could do a pull-up. Other technologies of sweetness exist, and I want you to know their names so you don't confuse them at the shop. The way tourists confuse ice wine and iced tea. Moscato, Asti style, and its Israeli cousins. Cold fermentation stopped early. Low alcohol, 5, 6, 7%. It's often a little fizzy. Grapey fun. Best ice cold. Easy Joy, the family table friend. The risk: Served warm or soft, it tastes like sentimental sugar. For Moscato, chill isn't optional. Chill is an ingredient. Late harvest, extra hang time on the vine, higher sugar, honeyed, richer. Still wine when the spine holds. Needs acid or it cloys. Check the specific bottle before you open anything. Another method involves fortified Muscat, spirit added mid-ferment, residual sugars plus higher alcohol, 14% and up. Mouth-filling, aromatic, after-dinner intensity. A different lethargical register than light Moscato. And a place to remember the Shulhan Aruch's restrained head. Judgment Night is not New Year's Eve in Times Square. Another methodology we've discussed before, botrytis. It's called noble rot. Rare, complex, honey and saffron stories when it happens. Don't confuse it with Different plot, different fungus, different miracle. And cheap sacramental sweet red. The wine, our thesis, declines as default. Upgrade beside it. Don't mock the minhug. Parallel play. 2 bottles. Peace in the family. When people say they don't want sweet wine. What they usually mean is, I don't like unbalanced sugar, served warm, in the wrong glass, on a night when I wanted dignity. Fair. Neither do I. Neither, if we read it with wine geek honesty, does Nehemia's Table. Festive sweetness Is not a dare to drink syrup. It's a dare to make hope taste vivid, and vivid means structure. One more craft line before we pour: residual sugar is optional craft. Mamtakim is obligatory posture. The bottle is how we practice the posture with modern tools. The posture. Is actually older than the bottle. All right, desk tasting categories. Not a commercial. If you have bottles at home, pour with me in real time. If you don't, close your eyes and borrow my glass. Imagination is a kosher tasting vessel. We're scoring one thing above all: sweetness. Sweetness with a spine. Aroma lift, perceived sweetness against acidity, finish length, as well as serving temperature and food affinity. And the gut check I care about most: hope versus syrup. Does this glass make you sit up a little? Or does it make you want a glass of water and a nap? Small pours. Remember the restrained head. This is not a frat tasting. This is Judgment Week manners with better glassware. Okay, so let's start with the control. In my glass tonight is a house red. Dry, red fruit, a little cedar. The bottle that taught the kids that Kiddush can smell like a cellar instead of cough syrup. On an ordinary Friday, this might be the whole sermon, and a good one. On Rosh Hashanah, it's still welcome, especially if your minhag is dry for the blessing and sweet for the starters or dessert. I'm not issuing a Pesach from a microphone. I'm noticing contrast. Ask yourself, does this argue with honey, or does it sit besides honey like a polite cousin? Mine argues, not rudely, but the tannin and the honey are having 2 different conversations. Would I want it along For four hours of soda? Probably not. Hold that. Glass number two, the semi-sweet aromatic. This is the peace treaty bottle. The aunt who hates dry wine. The cousin who only drinks something fruity. The guest who got burned by one bad sweet red. In 1987 and never recovered. Rose petals, lychee— there it is— a little ginger on the palate, a kiss of sugar. And then, if the acid and the chill are doing their jobs, it snaps clean. Refreshing, not sticky. This isn't dumbed down. This is reading the room. The way a good host reads a room, which, if you remember the Watergate, is half the mitzvah. It's cold. Not cold enough. Back in the bucket for 4 minutes, because chill is what turns this sugar from sticky into bright. Warm, this glass is candy. Cold, it's a garden. Same wine, And notice the finish next to the last one, shorter, but it agrees with the table. Glass 3, the ice-cold dessert. Inspire, Heights Wine, or both. Must be ice-cold. Here is the thesis in a glass. Apricot Leechy again, but deeper. Cooked, almost. Orange blossom. A thread of spice— cinnamon, maybe clover. Luscious. Montefiore's words fit. But now listen for the spine. There. That's where I want you to hear. The sweetness arrives, and then the acid picks up And carries it. 15, 20 seconds later, the conversation is still going. This wine belongs with the sweet-savory dance of a Rosh Hashanah starter course. If this glass tastes like flat-out candy, something is wrong. Too warm, too tired, wrong glass, or the wrong bottle for the job you hired it to do. But if it tastes long, If the finish keeps the conversation going after you swallow, then you're tasting what a frozen press and careful residual sugar and cold service are for. You're tasting sweetness that can rehearse hope without dissolving into nostalgia. And if you have both on the desk, the Inspire is the one you can buy 3 of and open the first one Friday night without thinking. The Heights wine is the one you open when you want the table to go quiet for a second. One is a great decision, the other is an occasion. Neither is a cartoon. I'll say this once more because it's so important: sweetness with spine equals aroma lift, plus acid, plus finish length, minus flabby sugar. Chill is not a cheat. Chill is part of the technology. Small pores are not stinginess. They are the shulchan orach's manners, with a wine geek accent. Food is not a distraction. Food is how sweet wine finds its job description. And if your family still wants the Concord on the table, keep it. Add glass 2 or glass 3 beside it. Nehemia said, drink sweet drinks. He did not say, drink only one idea of sweet. He certainly did not say, embarrass your relatives into dry Cabernet as a condition of belonging. He said, holy day, rich food, sweet drinks, portions for the unprepared, joy as strength. That's a toasting note disguised as a verse. You know the simanim, even if you don't use the word. The Gemara in Tractate Kritot, and again in Haryot, Talks about symbolic food for the new year: gourds, fenugreek, leeks, beets, and dates. You could call them omens, but omens that matter because symbols train the heart. Signs are not magic tricks, and these signs particularly are pedagogy you can chew. The Shulchan Aruch codifies the simanim plate. The Rima adds the apple and honey. Many avoid bitter and sour on the night we're trying to speak sweetness into the year. Some Ashkenazim have a nuts custom. And Yehi Ratzon language turns food into prayer with a plate under it. Shana tovah umtukah, not an Instagram caption. It's a curriculum for the palate. It's the body learning what the mouth is allowed to ask for. In many homes, the flow is Kiddush first, then hamotzi with honey on the challah, then the simanim plate, though orders vary. Amongst Chabad, Apples come first. Dates, then apples, in that sequence. I am not here to referee your grandmother. She has seniority. And here is what I will not do, and I want it on the record in clear audio. I will not invent a classical source to say The Kiddush cup is the first siman, or the Kiddush cup is the last siman. That din is not on the books in any form. Sweet wine for Rosh Hashanah Kiddush is best framed 3 ways: as a wine education custom, the Rosh Hashanah exception that even dry wine advocates endorse, As a family tradition that always seemed to spark laughter among the multi-generations at the table. And finally, as midrash-adjacent storytelling. Not shulchan aruch. Not a new stringency. Not a new leniency dressed up as an ancient law. So here is the safe sentence. The one I'll stand behind on the air. And at your table, if I'm lucky enough to be invited. The simanim teach the palate to pray. Apple and honey says metuka with fruit. Nehemia said it with drink. I'm not inventing a din that kiddush is a siman. I'm noticing that on Rosh Hashanah, the cup can rhyme with the honey. Instead of arguing with it. That's enough. Rhyme is not legislation. Rhyme is poetry that helps you remember what the night is for. The Jewish memory has always loved a good rhyme between plate and cup and calendar. And now the clause of the verse everyone skips because the verse doesn't skip it. Send portions to one for whom nothing is prepared. This is not modern mishloach manot. Don't collapse Purim into Tishrei. This is hospitality and charity ethics inside a holiday. Festive food and drink that travel towards the empty place. The person who didn't cook, The person who can't afford a nice bottle. The person who just moved to town. The person who is quietly certain that nobody remembered them this year. Sweetness that stays in your own glass isn't finished liturgy. It's a private tasting. Nehemia wanted a public joy, with an address label. So, practical tips Spoken like a friend standing in your kitchen while the soup threatens to boil over. Chill hard. Desert and aromatic sweets live in the ice bucket. Warm sweet wine is how hopes turn to regret and how the stereotype gets its revenge. Pour smaller on Judgment Night. Aw on the face. You can always pour again. You cannot untake a fuzzy head into a seriousness the day deserves. Pair Beyond cake with its starters: chopped liver, if that's your world; simis, if the cloves behave; or hamim, if you're svaradi. Sweet wine loves contrast, the way teshuvah loves honesty. So, in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, you should really prepare 2 bottles, minimum, on the sweetness question. One dry, or house kiddush, for people who live there, one semi-sweet or dessert, so nobody is stranded, and so the honey on the apple has a friend in the cup instead of an argument. And send portions Literally, invite someone who doesn't have a soda. Walk a bottle next door. Share the craft dessert wine instead of hoarding it. People will understand. Understanding grows when it's poured. That was true of Torah at the Watergate, and it's especially true of Gortz Treminner in a half bottle. Mine, on the record, there's a half bottle of Heitz wine in my fridge with someone else's name on it, a neighbor who is spending this holiday at a smaller table than last year. It goes over before candle lighting with a note that says nothing clever, just Shana Tova Umtuka, and a request to keep the bottle. If sweetness is how a judged people rehearses hope, then hope that never leaves the house is only half-rehearsed. The Watergate crowd didn't just taste, they sent. Let your table finish the verse. Let me leave you where we started. At the Watergate. And one detail I saved. The text tells us why the people wept: because they understood. And then it tells us why they feasted. Same reason, word for word: because they understood the words that were declared to them. Understanding didn't end the tears. Understanding passed through the tears and ended at a table. It ended with rich food and sweet drink and a plate carried down a half-built street to a door where nothing was prepared. That's the whole holiday. That's the whole verse. And that, if you will allow it, And this is the whole reason a wine podcast has any business talking about the Book of Life. Because here is what Rosh Hashanah asks of a Jew, and it is stranger than it sounds. The King is on the throne, the books are open, your name is being written in one of them, and— What? The tradition's answer? The answer Nehemia gave? The answer the Rima wrote down? The answer your grandmother gave with a bottle of something too sweet? It's not to hide. And it's not to starve. And it's not even to perform grief until God is impressed. The answer is to set a table. To pour something sweet and cold and honest, and to pour it first for the person who has nothing—that's not denial; that's defiance. It's a people standing in judgment and saying, "We understand," and we are still going to taste the year as if it's going to be good—in fact, great. So on Friday night, when you lift the cup, before the apple, before the honey, before anyone says the words, listen to it. The Kiddush cup makes a sound when it's set down on the table, a small ring. 10 days from now, the last sound of the season will be a shofar. One long blast that says the gates are closing. Between those two sounds is everything. Between the ring of the cup and the cry of the ram's horn is the whole argument of the Amim Noraim, and the tradition is telling you which one comes first. The cup comes first. Sweetness comes first. And hope comes first, before you know the verdict, because that's what hope is. So here's my blessing to you, and I mean every word of it, from this desk in Bergenfield. May the sweetness in your cup this year be the kind you have to sit up for, the kind with spine, the kind with a finish That keeps talking after the sip. May the sweetness in your ear be the same. Not syrup, not sugar that crashes by 10 PM. Real sweetness, the kind that survives acid. The kind you can think with. The kind you can send. May your head stay clear enough to remember the king. And your hearts stay soft enough to remember the neighbor. And may you understand, and may your understanding end at a table. Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, send portions to the one for whom nothing is prepared. And don't be grieved, for the joy of the Lord Is your strength. I'm Simon Jacob. This was the kosher terroir, season four, episode forty-one. Wrong bottle, right night. Tonight the wine geek lost on purpose. He has never been happier to lose. כתיבה וחתימה טובה, שנה טובה עמתוקה, תזכו לשנים רבות. לחיים. This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Terroir. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you're new to The Kosher Terroir, Please check out our many past episodes.