With the Passover Seder meals behind us, it’s time for those of us who put effort into carefully planning the Seder wines to assess what worked well and what could have been improved. Having recently passed the Wine and Spirits Education Trust Level 3 certification and writing a wine column, my extended family was impressed enough to hand me the responsibility of choosing the holiday wines.

I did my research, polling some serious wine geek friends and reviewing the recommendations of top kosher wine bloggers. The Kosher Terroir podcast was particularly helpful, with a wonderful series of discussions organized by one of the best-connected and most beloved figures in kosher wine, S. Simon Jacob. From his home in Jerusalem (and previously in the US), Simon has befriended and supported just about every kosher winemaker and is constantly tasting and discussing wine with his global network. For his Passover podcast, Simon dialed up 17 winemakers and wine experts from around the world, quizzing them on their strategies for the four cups. Check out the episode on your favorite podcast app.

My Seder plan was simple: three cups of rosé and a concluding sweet late-harvest skin-macerated wine from the creative Israeli winemaker Yaacov Oryah. But things didn’t go as planned. I started with an Israeli Méthode Champenoise sparkling wine for cup one and followed with a Pet-nat so my family could appreciate the difference between these two types of bubbly wines. I explained that the traditional sparkling wine, or “Méthode traditionnelle,” involves a complex process that starts with the fermentation of neutral base wine, followed by bottling and adding additional yeast, wine, and sugar to induce secondary fermentation. The bottles are then slowly manipulated to allow the yeast to settle out and the residue to disgorge. Finally, more wine is added for flavor and to top off the bottle.

Unless the wine is produced and made from grapes grown in the Champagne region, laws and treaties bar the wine from being labeled as Champagne. It’s a fairly elaborate and expensive process that we often don’t appreciate, especially if we think of all sparking wine as being the same. Indeed, unless the wine is from the Champagne region of France or is labeled as using the traditional or champagne-type method, sparkling wine may be produced much more simply, as with the popular Moscato D’Asti or Italian Prosecco. Spanish Cava, a great example of a sparkling wine that relies on the traditional method (despite not using the word “Champagne”), rounds out the most common sparkling options.

The sparkling wine that I introduced for the second cup, however, was a Pet-nat, a wine that uses the “méthode ancestrale,” a simple but refreshing sparkler that bottles the wine before the initial fermentation is complete, trapping the CO2 and resulting in a lightly fizzy and hazy wine. These bottles are typically sealed with a beer bottle-type crown cap. I figured this would be ideal for a second cup consumed on a still-empty stomach before dinner. But I forgot to consider the Seder service logistics, where the second cup is filled long before it is consumed. That cup is referenced during the service, including the traditional finger dips to spill drops of wine to mark each of the ten plagues. Suffice it to say that this part of the plan “fizzled” out (literally, as in no more “fizz”). Strike one.

Strike two against my plan came when it was time for cup 3. This was supposed to be time for the fancy Israeli Pinot Noir I had initially selected. However, having heard my lecture about the interesting skin-macerated sweet orange wine scheduled for cup 4, our seder guests didn’t want to wait, fearing late-night sluggishness and wine haze setting in. My credibility was already damaged with the fizzed-out Pet-nat, and the seder guests demanded we adapt my plan and taste the sweet late-harvest skin-macerated Oryah Riesling first. As a result, the Pinot ended up serving as the final wine of the evening. This may have been for the best, as plenty was left over. With an extra day of exposure to oxygen, the wine was quite delicious when consumed the next day for lunch.

One footnote of interest is the existence of a kosher Champagne for sale, produced by Kedem in New York, not in France. This anomaly is possible due to a historical loophole. Long ago, much of the world agreed to respect the French demand to protect the Champagne brand. However, the United States did not ratify those treaties. Many U.S. producers were using popular European terms for classic wines like Sherry, Burgundy, Chablis, and Champagne and didn’t want to give up the branding. Finally, in 2005, the U.S. ratified the international accords governing wine labeling, but with a loophole. If a producer had used the international names prior to March 2006, they could continue doing so indefinitely. Kedem has been producing New York Champagne for decades, enabling the company to be one of the few legally calling its bubbly New York beverage Champagne!