Where to buy Palwin No 10 wine?

JustHavingFun

Mon, Mar 05 2012, 5:35 pm

Palwin No. 10 is a sweet dessert wine, 12.5% alcohol. May be Carmel winery. We've only seen it in London. Has anyone seen it here in NYC?

JustHavingFun

Mon, Mar 05 2012, 5:47 pm

I found a picture.

Raisin

Mon, Mar 05 2012, 6:22 pm

Why would you want it? It is so sweet and sickly. I have some bottles we received as gifts, unused. Its one of the only wines we will not serve to guests, thats how bad we think it is.

I guess you have to grow up drinking it to like it.

(not in NYC)

boysrus

Mon, Mar 05 2012, 11:32 pm

omg, you are taking me back to my childhood! my traditional, not frum grandfather would only drink palwin number 10, we always choked on it, made jokes about it and kept trying to introduce him to kedem whenever he came to visit us.!!!

thanks! good luck finding it , sorry, I can't help you

hila

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 12:55 am

Me too! that was our kiddush wine Sad

Yuk !

There are such great wines around today, even sweet ones, why get No 10 ?

shalhevet

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 2:10 am

Oh wow, that takes me back to my childhood. I guess we were used to it. I wonder who makes/ made it - was it imported or bottled in England?

shoeboxgirly

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 2:27 am

It is created solely for the British market, and is available in many shops and supermarkets here. I can't think of a reason it would be in NY or why on earth you'd want it. Especially the 10, we'd have a 4a for 'special occasions' when I was little, but it is an embarrassment to wine!

I think if you really want it you might have to see if someone can bring it over for you.

shalhevet

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 2:55 am

Quote:

Sorry, Palwin lives to flay your palate another day

By Robyn Rosen, August 27, 2009
Follow The JC on Twitter
An 1955 advertisement for Palwin wine, as it appeared in the JC

An 1955 advertisement for Palwin wine, as it appeared in the JC

Some people always have a “glass is half empty” attitude. So when stocks of the famously sweet kiddush wine, Palwin, appeared to have run low at supermarkets across the country, frantic customers contacted the JC, worried that Palwin had closed down.

More than 100,000 bottles of Palwin wine are produced every year by the Israeli winery, Carmel, solely for the British market, but customers have reported a shortage in recent months.

But before readers dash to stock up on their favourite kiddush tipple, we can reveal that the shmittah year in 2008 meant that Carmel had to cease producing it — temporarily.

Adam Montefiore, wine development director at Carmel, said: “I can categorically deny that Palwin has gone bust.

“A large proportion of Palwin’s customers would not buy a wine from a shmittah year. So the wine was not produced in 2008, but will return with the wine made from the 2009 harvest.”

The Torah states that agricultural activity is prohibited every seventh year to allow the land to rejuvenate, but Mr Montefiore said that shelves will soon be stacked full of the wine.

Palwin wine, Israel’s oldest brand, was first produced by the Palestine Wine and Trading Company which was formed in England in 1898. It is now only sold in the UK.

It is used predominantly as kiddush or communion wine and the difference between the ranges is the alcoholic content: Palwin No 10 is 12.5 per cent alcohol; No 4 is 14.5 per cent.

“Palwin and the British market have been inseparable for 111 years,” Mr Montefiore added. “There is no reason it should not continue.”

NU, it’s a love-hate relationship

Most British Jews have a deeply ambivalent relationship with Palwin wines.

On one hand there are some wonderful associations — Friday nights, family occasions and chicken soup — everything we hold dear. On the other hand there is the inescapable fact that it tastes truly awful.

This clearly has not put us off buying it — in fact if it wasn’t for British Jews, Palwin would not still be in existence. We still make that tantalising choice between Palwin No 4 (sweet and sickly) and Palwin No 10 (sickly and sweet), although its popularity is not what it once was..

However, this is not the reason we do not serve Palwin at the dinner table. Nobody has ever served Palwin at the dinner table, in the same way that nobody would ever serve cough medicine at the dinner table — although to be honest, if you are looking for bouquet, body and subtlety of flavour, you would better off going with the Benylin.

Raisin

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 5:46 am

true story: I was at a wedding and the chazan needed some wine for sheva brochos. So he was asking for wine. On the table were several bottles of dry red and white wine. I pointed to them, and said, theres some wine, use that. No, this wasn't good enough. He needed kiddush wine. Palwin preferably, but kedem would do in a pinch.

I guess palwin is like marmite...love it or hate it.

JustHavingFun

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 11:39 am

This is hilarious. I had no idea it was the equivalent of the Manischewitz extra-heavy Malaga wine my family would serve at holidays! It was the only wine they knew!

DH is a Brit and emphatically does not like dry wines. I don't drink, will enjoy a dry wine, but prefer not making kiddush on dry wine. So the Palwin No 10 ended up on our table after a trip to London. And I'll admit something, but just to you gals..., I actually like it! But boy is it strong! It gets a little buzz going after kiddush. Dancing

Gee, I wonder if the Malaga stuff would taste good to me now-a-days.......... shock

MGmom

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 11:42 am

I'd try liquors galore in flatbush.. they gotta nice diverse selection or thay might have something similar.. nice service too!

shosh

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 11:58 am

Having grown up south of the river, Palwin was the only kosher wine I'd ever heard of till Eliaz suddenly appeared when I was around 16. Even the name brings back memories of shul Kiddushes, United Synagogue weddings, and the hats rather reminiscent of Ascot and short skirts worn by the women who used to drive to shul, but at least they all came. And Rosh Hashanah, when shul was so packed out that we used to daven in the local Territorial Army hall, where there was a stuffed bull's head on the wall that had to be covered with an Israeli flag during the tefillos.

Yes, the name Palwin (an acronym of the Palestine Wine Company, one of the world's first commercial kosher wine producers) definitely brings back some sweet memories. And even though my life is very different today, and I always swore that I'd find a much better wine when I grew up and that I didn't want my kids to grow up as the only observant Jews in a non-Jewish school, etc etc blah blah, I have to say that it raises a lot of nostalgia too ...

And now to my next question: Why on earth would someone living in New York, with Kedem and all the other much more quality wines voluntarily look for anything as revolting as Palwin No. 10?

Raisin

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 12:07 pm

Ad copy for palwin

You thought kedem and manishewitz are the most sickly sweet wines out there
...that's becausue you haven't tasted Palwin no. 10
For over 100 years British Jews have known that kiddush can only be truly enjoyed with palwin. Now, this elixir is being imported to the states as well.
This year, celebrate extraordinarily bad wine with Palwin!
available from all the finest wine shops.

(I remember eliaz! almost as bad! we used to use a big fat bottle, some type of tokay. then we used eliaz. Now my parents use bartenura or kedem)

JustHavingFun

Tue, Mar 06 2012, 3:19 pm

Quote:

Having grown up south of the river, ...

South of WHAT river?

Quote:

Ad copy for palwin

For a sec I thought that was a real ad!!!

Quote:

And now to my next question: Why on earth would someone living in New York, with Kedem and all the other much more quality wines voluntarily look for anything as revolting as Palwin No. 10?

Maybe the allure of Palwin No 10 has to do with the circumstances under which we got the bottle: DH saw the Palwin in a shop when we were in London and I said I'd never heard of it. We got a bottle and I put it into my shlep bag. Since my MIL thinks DH drinks too much (he has a glass of wine at kiddush and maybe a little glass or two of a liqueur at the meal), he asked me to hide it in our suitcase while Mum wasn't looking. I cracked up laughing, for here's a nearly 50 y.o. man hiding wine from Mummy! Before we got home I saw some movers unpacking some boxes and there was a lot of that squishy foam "paper" used for wrapping delicate things. I asked for a sheet of it (their trash), wrapped the bottle, and it made it all the way through customs and baggage handling without breaking. My MIL had NO idea we were "smuggling" wine out of London. I think this is a riot!!! Cheers

Another wine note: We had a bottle of Kedem Cream White in the closet for some time, over a year, and it turned brownish. I opened it and sniffed. I wouldn't drink it (I'm not so fond of it when it's not oxidized), but it is a good substitute for sherry in my cooking. All's well that ends well.