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Why is kosher wine sometimes boiled?
I've been reading recent debates about Catholic communion wine, and which types of wine are or are not valid. One person suggested that kosher wine is always valid, someone else said that kosher wine is not valid because it's boiled, someone else said that (a) boiling isn't a problem, and (b) kosher wine isn't always boiled, however (c) the reason it's sometimes boiled is that Jews incorrectly think that this makes it invalid for Catholic mass, and therefore (d) even though it is valid, he'd prefer to avoid it.
I'm not going to ask here about the ramifications for Catholicism: that's for the Catholics to sort out. But, is it true that kosher wine is (sometimes?) boiled, and, if so, why?
1 answer
Kosher wine must never have been used for anything that he talmud sees as idolatry and the suspicion, dating back to talmudic times, is that an idolater's even slightly moving an open bottle, could have had in mind idolatrous service thus changing the status of the wine to "forbidden" for Jews. As such, wine that was the kind that idolaters would use could not be handled by a non-Jew. One way around this was to reduce the quality of the wine by heating it. This made for an inferior product which would not be used for idolatry.
This practice continues today. Some kosher wine is flash heated which allows it to be of a "cooked" status so there is no concern that an idolater would change its status.
for more
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-mevushal-wine/
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