Surprise inspections by the certifying body aren’t uncommon.Īdditionally, nothing can be added to the wine that itself is not certified kosher. In practice, this means that from when the grapes are first tipped into a destemmer or a vat to the moment the capsule goes on the bottle, everything must be done by the shomer shabbat. In order for a wine to be certified kosher, it must be made, start to finish, by sabbath-observant Jews (shomer shabbat), and not have been intentionally touched or moved by anyone who doesn’t meet that criteria. Like all kosher foodstuffs, a wine must first and foremost be certified kosher by an official body, which usually means either the Orthodox Union or the Organized Kashrut Laboratories (aka OK Labs). Here’s a quick primer for those who may not know what is involved in making a wine kosher.

It took me a little while but I recently managed to get my hands on a few of them. I wrote about this phenomenon for Jancis Robinson in 2021 but I hadn’t yet tasted the wines themselves. But then in the course of a conversation with a Napa winemaker, I heard about someone making another kosher wine in Napa, and I began to dig, which led to the discovery of a whole new wave of kosher wines being made in California. They began with 500 cases of kosher Cabernet, added a Chardonnay in 2011, and kept growing.įor more than a decade that seemed to be all there was to California kosher wine. The real revolution in American kosher wine came in 2003 when Jeff Morgan and his business partner Leslie Rudd began the brand Covenant, aiming to make a Napa Cabernet that was first a fine wine, but also happened to be kosher. Hagafen’s top efforts, in particular, were excellent wines. Both were remarkably successful in doing so ( and Herzog keeps expanding). Then in the late 70s and early 80s along came Hagafen and Baron Herzog, two wineries unapologetically aiming to raise the bar for kosher wine in California. It took many years for me to realize those flavors were not what wine actually tasted like.įor the longest time, the options available for kosher wine in America were extremely limited. Even for me, a particularly unobservant Jew, this was most certainly my first taste of wine, and remains an indelible, if not particularly pleasant, sense memory. Almost certainly, one of the formative tastes in any young Jewish American’s life is the sickly sweet, Concord grapeyness of Manischewitz wine, ritually sipped at a Passover seder.

Kosher non alcoholic wine