[Avodah] Concord wine for 4 kosos

[Zev Sero]

Micha Berger wrote:
> I came up with the following originally as a joke, for "The Chumrah of the
> Month Club". However, I now repeated it so many times, I can't see the flaw in
> the reasoning. Please talk me down...
> 
> A hybrid of concord grapes and old-world grapes is seedless, ie a mule. This
> is why the former is called Vitis labrusca, and the latter, Vitis vinifera. I
> believe that this inability to crossbreed to produce fertile offspring is
> halachically sufficient to consider them two species.
> 
> So, how do we know that concord wine is yayin for 4 kosos? Why isn't it chamar
> medina? Perhaps its use, and making a hagafen/hagefen on it is a practice
> entrenched before the botony was better known?

Lich'ora, this is the same shaila as the Muscovy duck.  It's clearly
a different species, both zoologically and halachically.  Deliberately
creating a crossbreed would be kilayim.  But it looks like a duck, it
walks like a duck, it swims like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and it
tastes like a duck.  On that basis, many poskim in the 19th century
paskened that it's kosher like a duck.  Lich'ora the same poskim would
have no problem with the concord grape.

As for those who assered the Muscovy duck, perhaps they were merely
being machmir because off tamei is deoraita.  The requirement to use
wine for kiddush, arba kosot, etc, as well as the choice of bracha
to make over it, are all derabanan.  Perhaps even they would say that
if it looks, grows, tastes, squeezes and ferments like a grape, it's
included in what Chazal meant by "grape".


-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas