When is a banana a vegetable? When seen through the eyes of Israel's most orthodox Jews. The law of orlah forbids using the fruit of plants under 4 years old, which should include bananas, whose bushes die every year. But clever rabbis observed that since horticulturists define fruit as the edible part of a perennial, anything that comes from an annual must be a vegetable. Making both papayas and bananas kosher.

Since grapevines are never much good till their fourth year, orlah doesn't impede them, but other laws do. Shmita, for instance, the macro-Sabbath, stipulates that every seven years, debts are canceled and land lies fallow. You can harvest your grapes, but you can't sell the wine, only give it away like Green Stamps.

What would a rabbi do? He'd note that while the Torah commands Jews to leave their own land fallow, it says nothing about pagan land. You could "sell" your land to a non-Jew for a year, buy back crops at discount and share the profits.

The kosher wine process bristles with obstacles. From vineyard to bottle, only observant male Jews can handle. All equipment must be sterilized, and all substances - like yeast, tartar and sulfur dioxide - must be kosher. Because many of Israel's best winemakers aren't observant, they perform a kind of vinification by proxy, giving directions to devout employees.

At the Jerusalem Post site, jpost.com, even the orthodox find this stuff silly or, as a post titled "Wine Meshuggas" puts it, "Nuts, nuts and triple nuts!"

Another writes, "Orthodox Judaism, along with Islamic fundamentalism, with its superstitions, magic and half-baked laws from ancient quacks, has no reason to exist in our day and age!!!"

Which brings the response "What gives the right to you or your parents or grandparents to settle and build a country in a land set smack in the middle of the Arab world if not for those 'super- stitions and half-baked laws'?"

Which just goes to show that one person's nut job is another's . . . banana. But who cares, if it doesn't affect the wine? It does when wines are mevushal, or boiled. Boiled, that is, in the mildest sense: flash-pasteurized for 22 seconds at 180 degrees. But even that can produce cooked, rubbery, Madeirized flavors. Producers who claim otherwise are missing the point: Mevushal was designed to make wine taste terrible. The idea was to keep idol-worshipping waiters from consecrating their pagan gods with the same wine they poured for Jews at the table, who would then unknowingly participate in the sin.

Most wines in Israel aren't mevushal. In fact, much isn't even kosher, and a lot of it is very good. Israel has an extremely diverse set of regions and microclimates for a country the size of New Jersey. They've been making wine in the region for over 6,000 years, and with new technology and winemakers, the quality is rising.

Exporters are trying to move the wines out of the kosher section and into new categories like "Mediterranean Wines." Cheerios and Heinz ketchup, they point out, are both kosher, but that's not their main appeal.

But don't all the nutty rules get in the way of good winemaking? Actually, wine whackery is nothing new. For example, biodynamic farming - an equally tangled web of superstition, strange doings and weird logic - often results in fabulous wine. Perhaps, having to negotiate bizarre rules with no fallback position - like buying grapes from unbelievers - forces producers to pay particularly careful attention at every step. Which is not nuts at all but simply good winemaking.

Jester@corkjester.com