Home

Potato latkes and jelly donuts may be the norm for Hanukkah food, but the Chabad of Hoboken organized something intended to be a bit more elegant and reflective this year, with a seminar that explored the spiritual value of wine.

During Chabad's wine and cheese tasting event at the Boys and Girls Club of Hoboken Dec. 24, a crowd of 20 sampled premium kosher wines while listening to Rabbi Shmuli Lewis connect each type of wine to a different life lesson.

Lewis, a wine expert and Chabad rabbi from Sparta, gives similar presentations throughout the state. He began his lecture with two white wines, Chardonnay and Riesling. Hoboken Chabad Rabbi Moshe Schapiro suggested that the audience make a blessing together, but Lewis quickly interjected.

"We'll get to [the blessing], but there's a whole production before you taste the wine," Lewis said, as he went on to teach the crowd how to uncork bottles, swirl their glasses and properly sniff their wine.

Some Chardonnay wines are acidic and others are creamy, Lewis explained, due to differences in how they are handled during fermentation, the process during which sugars in grapes are converted to alcohol. Human beings are the same way, Lewis said, because they often have split personalities, and what Chardonnay teaches us is that sometimes we are more righteous on certain days than others.

Continuing with the topic of fermentation, Lewis told a story about a monk in Northeast Hungary who returned to his vineyard one fall to see that all of his grapes were shriveled from a virus. But the wine the farmer made from those grapes turned out to be the sweetest he had ever cultivated, because dry grapes preserve all the necessary sugars and other ingredients for fermentation even without the presence of water.

"There are times in our lives when things seem really bad, but when we look back later we see that our greatest growth happened during those tough times," Lewis said to extract the lesson from his story.

Two red wines, Cabernet and Pinot Noir, were next in line. Cabernet can be grown anywhere, but Pinot requires cold climates and other very specific conditions to reach its full potential, Lewis said, much like the sensitivity humans need to display in order to best understand each other on a daily basis.

For the final three wines, an Australian Shiraz (red), a white Sauvignon, and Concord Kiddush wine made by Kedem, Lewis told the audience to taste the wine they specifically do not want to drink.

After asking the crowd what they liked about each wine, Lewis revealed what he called the most important lesson about wine tasting: the value of trying new wines in order to find the redeeming quality in each one and develop a larger repertoire. There was a lesson in this activity as well.

"If life is about connecting myself with something beyond myself, with different kinds of people, then life can be meaningful and great," Lewis said.

Schapiro closed the program by connecting wine to Hanukkah, explaining that grapes and olives both need to be crushed in order to develop the essence of both items, wine and oil (which was used to light the menorah in the Temple). The Jewish nation also often needs to be crushed and exiled, Schapiro said, for the most important aspects of its character to shine through.

"The Hanukkah light is telling us to never be satisfied with what we do today, but to always increase our efforts to end these sorrows, and each one of us can do so with that one little mitzvah. We can't be scared of these dark winter nights and this exile," Schapiro said.

Wine experts and novices alike seemed to enjoy the evening's program.

"I drink wine all the time, but I don't know anything it," said Scott Davidovic, of Hoboken. "It was great to be educated about something I come across so frequently."

"I already know a lot about wine, but I felt that bringing the spiritual aspect of how wine can play into our rituals was really nice," Elizabeth Bland said.