In the past 4+ years living in Spain, I’ve seen my fair share of Spanish and Portuguese wineries. From old, rancid smelling and spiderweb infested bodegas making drop dead gorgeous wines to sleek and modern wineries who couldn’t make a decent bottle of wine if their life depended on it, my experiences have been vast and memorable. But never in my life have I ever experienced a time when I walked into a winery making Kosher wine and was told, in a manner of speaking, “I’m sorry, but you can’t actually see the wine, both because you are impure as a non Sabbath-observant Jew and because you’re a woman.”

Gives you a moment of pause doesn’t it? My following thought was, “Am I so powerful that I can actually make an entire vat of wine turn into vinegar just by looking at it?! How many people, or things, have I made impure in my life? If only I had known the breadth of my powers earlier!” Sarcasm aside, the fact that I cannot look at the wine, touch the wine, or get near the wine as a woman or a non Sabbath-observant male Jew, is astounding, simply because it goes be