From Two Bottles For Five Dollars to 100 Points

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. I'm Solomon Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers, If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine, sit back, relax, and enjoy. March 1996. I want you to picture a supermarket flyer. Not a wine list, a flyer. Newsprint. Smudged ink, coupons for chicken and paper towels. And there, between the seltzer and the horseradish, the wine section. One line: Manischewitz Concord, 2 bottles, $5. That was kosher wine. That was the whole category as far as the world was concerned. A wine so sweet you could pour it on pancakes, a category so small it amounted to 3/10 of 1% of the American premium wine market. And here is the part almost nobody knows: about 80% of that Concord wasn't even being drunk by Jews. It had become quietly Everybody's cheap sweet wine, chilled over ice on a Tuesday. Now keep that flyer in the left hand, because in your right hand I want you to put something else. June 2026, last month, an urban winery from Berkeley, California Concrete floors, barrels stacked to the ceiling, the smell of toast and dark fruit hanging in the cold air. A Cabernet Sauvignon called Solomon Lot 70, and a number that no winery devoted entirely to kosher wine, no kosher-only winery on earth, had ever received from a major publication. 100 points. Not 95. Not simply in quotes, impressive for a kosher wine. Not even the polite applause we've learned to accept for decades. The compliment with the asterisk carved into it. 100 points. Perfect. No asterisk of any kind. Full stop. And to the connoisseurs already reaching for their keyboards, yes, I know about Bordel. I know about the 2009 and the great château whose perfect score vintage had kosher barrels resting in the very same cellar. We're going to tell that story tonight too, because for 17 years, that was the closest kosher wine ever came one cellar door away from perfection without ever quite touching it. Hold that thought. It only makes what happened in Berkeley sweeter. 30 years, one generation. That is the entire distance between the flyer in your left hand and the score in your right. Between two for five dollars and perfection. And tonight I want to walk you across that distance, bottle by bottle, country by country, blessing by blessing. Welcome back to The Kosher Terroir. I'm Solomon Simon Jacob, and if you've been with the show for a while, you know I come to wine the way most of you do— not from the cellar door, but from the table. 30 years of Thursday night bottles, of standing in wine shops squinting at a hashkacha, a Friday night when the wine on the table wasn't much different between one meal and another. I have watched this story happen from the drinking side, and I'm telling you, we have lived through something extraordinary. And most of us have never stopped to notice. So tonight's episode is a walk through time. 3 visits to the same world: 1995, 2006, and today, 2026. Think of it the way you'd think of tasting the same vineyard across 3 decades of vintages. Same ground, same grape, but the vine has grown, the roots have gone deeper, and what's in the glass is almost unrecognizable. In 1995, I could have named you every serious kosher winery on planet Earth in a single breath, and I would have needed most of that breath. For Israel. One world-class winery on a volcanic plateau in the Golan, a stubborn handful of believers in California, and a brand new experiment in a Catalan village that nobody had ever heard of yet. That was it. That was the world. Tonight you'll be watching that world grow, and I promise you The cast of this story is better than anything I could invent. A Barcelona Jewish community that walked into a Spanish farms cooperative and asked for something Spain hadn't made in 500 years. A Frenchman in Madoc who talked the Rothschilds into something no classified château had ever done. And who ends the story decades later in a place you will not see coming. A senior editor at Wine Spectator who walked away from the magazine to make kosher wine with his own hands. And last month, that decision was vindicated in front of the entire world, and a squat little blue bottle of sweet Italian fizz that wandered out of the kosher aisle into a hip-hop lyric and into 10 million tables a year, most of them not Jewish. The best-selling kosher wine on Earth, it turns out, has been hiding in plain sight all along. And it's white. That matters more than you'll think, but we'll get there. Underneath all of it Underneath the scores and the chateaus and the blue bottles, there's a question of Torah running through this episode like a seam of limestone under a vineyard. Because kosher wine isn't just wine made carefully, it's wine bound by halacha, by laws 2,000 years old, laws about who touches the wine and why, laws will open up properly in the first chapter. And one of those laws, the one that says wine can be cooked, vushal, spent most of the last century as the reason kosher wine tasted like an apology: boiled, flattened, muted. Tonight I'm going to make an argument that may surprise you. That very law, the one that punished us, is part of how this revolution happened. The constraint became the engine. That's not just a wine story. That's the most Jewish story there is. And at the very end of the walk, there's a blessing waiting for us. A real one, codified in the Shulchan Aruch, and almost custom-written for this exact moment in our history. It's the blessing you say when a second cup of wine comes to the table, different from the first, and not lesser than it. I won't say more than that now, but I'll tell you this: by the time we get there, you're going to want to say it. So pour yourself something, and tonight maybe pour something you couldn't have poured in 1995. A kosher Sancerre, a Moselle Riesling, a Judean Hills white with minerality. Because to understand how improbable everything in that glass is— the color, the country, the score on the shelf tag— You have to smell the world it came from, and that world smells like Concord grapes and newsprint. I want to begin with a confession: I love that wine, the wine in the flyer. If you grew up at a Shabbat table in America, or your parents did, or your grandparents, you know it. Before I describe it. The heavy bottle, the purple so dark it stained the tablecloth if your uncle poured carelessly, and he always poured carelessly. That smell, grape jelly and candied violets, rising off the kiddush cup while you waited, 7 years old, for your little sip. That was Concord. And before we spend an episode explaining how we outgrew it, it deserves 2 minutes of honor, because that wine did a job no Grand Cru ever did. It kept Kiddush alive in America for 100 years. Here's the thing most people never ask: why Concord? Why was American kosher wine made from a grape no serious winemaker Europe would touch? And the answer is geography, not theology. When our great-grandparents came through Ellis Island in the 1880s and '90s, they needed wine for Shabbat immediately, every single week. And the noble European vines would not survive New York's winter, but Concord would. Concord, a Native American Lambrusca grape bred in Massachusetts, hardy as a fence post, grew happily in New York and Pennsylvania. One problem: Lambrusca grapes carry a wild, musky flavor the trade politely calls foxy, and underneath it, a bitter streak. So the winemakers buried it the only way they could— sugar. Understand this and you understand everything. The sweetness of American kosher wine was never a taste of preference. It was a patch, a workaround. Galut, exile in a bottle. We made kiddush on grapes that grew where we were allowed to live. And the patch became an empire. A factory in Brooklyn turned out Manischewitz by the millions of bottles. A jingle so catchy— Man, oh, Manischewitz— that by the mid-'50s, an astonishing truth was that most of it, maybe 80%, was being drunk by people who weren't even Jewish at all. Adding Kedem, the Herzog family's heritage line, and by the '90s you had some 2 million cases a year of Sweet Concord, while all of kosher wine, everything, amounted to 0.3% of the American premium market. Half the category's revenues arrived in 3 months before Pesach. Kosher wine wasn't a wine category. It was a seasonal religious supply. Now, before we go one step further, we have to answer the question underneath the whole episode: Why is there such a thing as kosher wine at all? Grapes are kosher. Yeast is kosher. What's the problem? The problem is 2,000 years old, and it was never about hygiene. The Torah is concerned for yayin nesech, wine poured in the service of idols. Wine is pagan liturgy. But the sages went further. In Tractate Avodah Zarah, they decreed against staminam, not idolatrous wine, but ordinary wine. Handled by non-Jews. And the Gemara is startlingly honest about the reason: because of their daughters. Because wine is intimacy. Wine is how strangers become friends and friends become family. The decree codified in the Shulchan Aruch Yeredaiah chapter 23 was a fence around the Jewish table. At the exact place where the heart opens. You can argue with it, but you can't call it arbitrary. The rabbis understood precisely what wine is for, and then they left the door open. Wine that is cooked, yayin mevushal, was considered changed, diminished, no longer the kind of wine anyone would offer on an altar. Cooked wine falls outside of the decree. Anyone can handle it. That's in Avodah Zarah as well, codified in the same chapter of Yirah De'ah. In ancient Babylon, a technicality. In modern America, where kosher caterers need waiters of every background pouring at 300 weddings a night, it becomes an industry standard. And the standard meant boiling. And boiling meant flattened aromas, muted fruit, wine with the life cooked out of it. There it is, the asterisk, the reason kosher came to mean compromised. Hold on to that boiling, because in the last chapter of tonight's story We come back transformed, and I promise you, the twist you won't see coming. So who fought back? Let's start with the family. The Herzogs had made wine in Slovakia for generations, good enough that Emperor Franz Joseph ennobled the family. There's a baron in the lineage, remember that. The war took everything. In 1948, Eugene Herzog arrived in New York and went to work for a small kosher outfit called Royal Wine, driving the delivery truck, making the wine, taking part of his pay in shares. By 1958, the family owned it, and in 1985, his son did the audacious thing and they put the Baron on a California label. Baron Herzog, real varietal wine. And the flagship wasn't even a red, it was a Chenin Blanc from Clarksburg grapes, made by Peter Stern, a Californian who trained at Gallo and Mondavi. Keep Stern's name in mind too, because at that same moment he was flying across the world consulting for a brand new winery on a volcanic plateau in the Golan Heights. One pallet quietly shaping the kosher revolution on two continents at once. And here's the numbers that tell you the rebellion was working. By 1996, More than 60% of Royal sales were to people who weren't Jewish. They weren't buying it because it was kosher, they were buying it because it was good. The believers were scattered but stubborn. Up in Napa, a UC Davis-trained viticulturist named Ernie Weir had planted the flag back in 1979. Hagafen Cellars, the vine, insisting from day one that he was making Napa Valley wine that happened to be kosher, never the other way around. His first wine was a Riesling, and he has made one every single vintage since. In Sonoma, a purist named Craig Winchell ran Gan Eden practically single-handedly, precisely so that no drop would ever need be boiled. Small houses, small cases, enormous stubbornness. And then the stubbornness reached the most famous dining room in America. July 25th, 1994. That afternoon, on the White House lawn, Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan declared an end to 46 years of war between their countries. And that evening, at the state dinner in their honor, the White House poured an entirely kosher wine list: Hagafen Cabernet Sauvignon 1988 and Baron Herzog Brut, a kosher Napa Valley Chardonnay. Peace between Israel and Jordan, toasted by presidents and kings. In kosher wine. And here's what I love most about that table: nobody said, "Good for kosher wine." They just drank. One more stop in 1995, in the village of Capsanes, in the dry hills of Catalonia. A farmers cooperative founded in 1933 generations of families growing old grenacha on stony terraces and selling it off in bulk. And in that year, members of the Barcelona Jewish community came to the village with a request: make us kosher wine. Spain, Spain had not produced a kosher wine in the 20th century. 500 years almost exactly since the expulsion of 1492, and the farmers of Capsanis said yes. They built a small separate cellar. Shabbat-observant hands, and only those hands, touch the wine from crush to bottle. Old vines, dark cherries, wild Mediterranean herbs, warm stone, They called it Perach Ha'Aviv, the Flower of Spring. Think about that name for a moment. 5 centuries of winter in Spain, and in 1995, in a village most Jews had never heard of, something bloomed. So that was the world of the flyer. A jug of Brooklyn Concord Keeping the faith. A baron's name on a Californian Chenin Blanc, and a Riesling at the White House, and a flower opening in Catalonia. A constellation scattered, brave, and missing its center of gravity, because there was one place on Earth where kosher wine should have been leading the world. And in 1995 its finest boutique wines weren't even kosher. The quality experiment had believers. What it needed was a homeland. Remember Peter Stern, the Californian making Baron Herzog Chenin Blanc, the one I told you was flying across the world at the same time consulting for a brand new winery on a volcanic plateau. It's time to name it: the Golan Heights Winery. 8 kibbutzim and moshavim had planted vines up there starting in 1976, on black basalt soil, at elevations running from 400 meters to nearly 1,200, where the nights come down cold off of Mount Hermon. Even in August. In 1983, they built a winery in Katzrin, hired California, and started making wine under the label called Yarden. And in 1987, in London, a Yarden Cabernet Sauvignon from the 1984 harvest did something no Israeli wine had ever done. It won the trophy for best red wine at the International Wine and Spirits Competition. Not best kosher wine, best red. And then in Bordeaux itself, the grand prize at Vinexpo, not once but at 3 consecutive fairs. The Wine World had filed Israel under Sacramento. The Golan quietly refiled it, and the young Californian who took over the cellar in the early '90s, Victor Schoenfeld—hold his name—he's still there today, 34 vintages and counting. But here's the strange, uncomfortable truth about Israel in 1995. And it's the reason this chapter exists. Beyond the Golan, the kosher list thinned out fast. The big industrial houses were mid-renovation. The Jerusalem sellers were making grape juice and kiddush wines. Honorable, but not the argument we're having tonight. And the boutiques, the wineries the critics were actually excited about? The garage geniuses, garagistas, the avant-garde— almost none of them were kosher. The most celebrated boutique in the country was run by a man who said on the record, I'll never make a kosher wine. In the Judean hills, a self-taught cook turned winemaker was producing a red so good the head of Sotheby's wine department called it the best Israeli wine she had ever tasted, and it wasn't kosher either. Sit with that for a second. In 1995, in the Jewish homeland, the finest boutique wines being grown were wines most observant Jews couldn't drink. It was easier to keep a serious kosher cellar in Napa than from the cutting edge of Israel itself. And the bitter joke is that the land had been advertising its vineyards for 3,000 years. When the spies went to scout the land, what did they bring back as proof of its goodness? A cluster of grapes so heavy that two men carried it on a pole between them. The Eshkol, from the valley they named for it. When the Torah praises the land in Devarim chapter 8, the vine is right there among the Seven Species. The question was never whether Israel could grow great wine. The question was whether great wine and halacha would ever sit in the same barrel. Between 1995 and 2006, Everything moved at once. 70 wineries in Israel became 140. A critic named Daniel Rogoff—dry wit, iron palate—started publishing an annual guide with stars and scores, and suddenly Israeli wine had a scoreboard. Vineyards marched up into the Upper Galilee and down into the desert. Tsora, the kibbutz terroir laboratory in the Judean Hills, crossed over to kosher around the turn of the millennium, by most accounts the first of the boutiques to do so. But then came the pivot, the single most important data point in the modern history of kosher wine. In the middle of the 2002 vintage, and then fully in 2003, the self-taught winemaker in the Judean Hills named Eli Benzakine and his winery Domaine du Castel made a decision that the whole industry was watching. He took his celebrated Grand Vin kosher, full supervision from that vintage forward. And everyone braced for the verdict because everyone knew that kosher supposedly cost a winery in quality. Here's what actually happened, in the words of Adam Montefiore, the industry's longtime chronicler: Castel won more awards after going kosher than before. More The wine got scored, meddled, and celebrated harder than ever. And the excuse died. Not softened. Died. If the best boutique in Israel could go kosher and get better, then kashrut was never the ceiling. The ceiling was ambition. And then the desert raised its hand. At the edge of the Negev, on the high ground of the Yatir Forest. Vineyards at up to 900 meters planted in the late '90s. A young Adelaide-trained winemaker named Aaron Goldwasser was making a Cabernet-based red called Yatir Forest. In 2007, Robert Parker's Bureau scored Israeli wine for the very first time. Yatir Forest, 93 points. The same year, a Yarden Cabernet became the first Israel wine to ever crack the Wine Spectator's top 100. Kosher, both of them. Read those sentences again. The first time the world's most powerful critics looked seriously at Israel, and what they rewarded was kosher wine from a volcanic plateau and a desert forest. The frontier had answered. After Castel, the conversions came like dominoes. Agor went kosher with its 2007 vintage. Flam founded by the sons of Israel Flam, the very man who was Carmel's chief winemaker back in our 19— '95 snapshot crossed with the 2010 vintage. Vitkin, the old vines Carignan house, followed in the mid-2010s. And the last famous holdouts, they stopped holding out and started hedging. Pelter, the Golan's cult boutique, built an entirely separate kosher cellar at Ein Zivan. And called the label Matar. Chateau Golan launched a kosher line called Naveh. Think about what that means. In 1995, kosher was the exception at the top of Israeli wines. By the 2020s, the question had fully inverted. No longer, can kosher wine be great? But Can a great Israeli winery afford not to be kosher? Today the scoreboard reads like this: of the 5 Israeli wineries carrying 4 stars in the Hugh Johnson Pocket Wine Book, 4 are kosher. Israel has a Master of Wine running a kosher cellar in the Judean Hills, and in July 2025 Mid-war, with vineyards inside closed military zones, a Yarden Cabernet took a platinum medal and 97 points at the Decanter World Wine Awards, tying the highest score any Israeli wine has ever received. The homeland showed up. The argument is over. But notice what all this greatness had in common. It spoke Hebrew and English, California and Israel, but it required dedicated kosher wineries, built kosher from the first vine. There was a whole other way to make world-class kosher wine, and it was already being invented in one place with the most to teach— France. It started in 1986 with a handshake, a Rothschild, and a man whose name you've been waiting for since the very beginning of this episode. His name, Pierre Miodownik. Remember it, because this entire chapter, in a sense, this entire episode, runs through his hands. A French-Jewish winemaker chief winemaker for Royal Wine in Europe. And in 1986, he stood in the Haut-Médoc with a proposition that had never been tried. Let a kosher crew come inside a Rothschild château and make a kosher cuvée of real Bordeaux— same vines, same cellar, same standards. The Barons said yes. And when the first wine, the Barons Edmund and Benjamin de Rothschild Haut-Médoc Vintage 1986, reached the market in '89, something shifted that had never shifted before. Kosher wine became aspirational. Not a compromise you made for Shabbat, a bottle you wanted. Now think back to the very beginning of this episode, to that 2,000-year-old law about whose hands touch the wine, because the Cuvée model is that law performed like choreography. The Château keeps its vineyards its winemaker's judgment, its barrels, its name. But from the moment the grapes hit the crusher to the moment the cork goes in, only Shabbat-observant hands touch that wine. The mashgiach holds the cellar keys. The château's own team advises, watches, and tastes through the glass, but doesn't touch. It is halakha and haute couture in the same room. And it worked. It worked so well, it started climbing the classification ladder. In 1993, Château Kiscourt, a classified third growth of Margaux, became the first Cru Classé to open its doors to a kosher run. By the late '90s, the portfolio included a premier Grand Cru of Saint-Émilion. Then in 1999, the anchor, Château Leoville, a second growth of Saint-Julien, a wine built to age 20 years, begins making kosher cuvées and has never stopped. The 2000 turns it into a procession. The garage wine legend of Saint-Émilion. And my favorite in this whole chapter, Pont-à-Canet, the great fifth growth of Poulillac, didn't just tolerate a kosher crew, it built a dedicated kosher micro winery inside its own walls, a little kosher heart beating inside a classified Bordeaux château. And the verdict? Janice Robinson, as sober a palate as exists in wine, sat down and tasted kosher cuvées against the château's regular bottlings. Her findings, in her words, remarkably similar. Two words, and read them for what they are. That asterisk, kud for a kosher wine, died in France the same way it died in Israel— blind. So by the mid-2000s, there were two ways to make world-class kosher wine, and it's worth naming them because between them They explain the entire global market. The dedicated winery, kosher from the first vine, like Hagafen, like the Golan, like the urban winery in Berkeley, we'll return to before the night is out. And the cuvée, the guest room inside someone else's great house. One built identity, the other barred prestige. And in borrowing it proved a point no dedicated winery could prove alone. On the same vines, in the same cellar, in the same vintage, kosher and not kosher were simply the same. The Cuvée model brought kosher wine its credibility. The dedicated model turned that credibility into identity. And once the model was proven, it traveled. Kosher Chablis, kosher Sancerre, kosher Champagne from Four Houses. And I love how that happened at Drappier. Michael Drappier met the Herzogs at Vinexpo, and by 2007, the house was running kosher production, up to 30,000 bottles in a kosher year. Kosher Burgundy, from serious domains. Kosher Tokay from Hungary, kosher wines from Georgia, the oldest wine country on Earth, and in Italy, kosher Barolo, kosher Barbaresco, commissioned incredibly by a New York surgeon with a stubborn streak and a portfolio now past 90 wines. And that, my friends, is a whole future episode of this show, I promise you. The map of kosher wine, which in 1995 was just a few dots—Brooklyn, Napa, the Golan, and one Catalan village—became simply a map of the world. But I said this chapter runs through Pierre Modovnik's hands. And here is the part that gets me. In 2011, after a quarter of a century of making France kosher, the first Rothschild cuvée and nearly everything that followed, Pierre stepped back from it all. And where did he go? The Lower Galilee. He planted his own vineyard, Chenin Blanc and Syrah, the grapes of the France he came from and built Domaine Netofa in Israel. The man who spent 25 years bringing kosher wine into the châteaus of France went home to plant his own vines in the land of Israel. If you had written it as fiction, an editor would have cut it for being just too neat. And then the story did him one better. 2024. Two Israeli wineries, Sora, the Judean Hills terroir house, and Flam, the family estate we met in the last chapter, did something no Israeli winery had ever done. Together they bought a château. Château Tour du Haut Moulin. In the Hot Medak, the very appellation where Midovnik poured that first kosher cuvée in 1986. Sit back and savor the deeper symmetry. It was a Rothschild who planted Bordeaux winemaking in Israel. Baron Edmund in Zichron Yaakov back in 1882. 142 years later, Israel came back to Bordeaux as an owner, the first Israeli owners of a Bordeaux estate. Kosher Cruvée on the way, and the man at the center of it deserves his name now: Eran Pic, Syrah winemaker and Israel's first master of wine. That anonymous master of wine I mentioned in the last chapter, running a kosher cellar in the Judean hills— that's him, a kosher winemaker with the wine world's most exclusive credential: buying Bordeaux dirt. In 1986, a Jewish winemaker asked permission to borrow a corner of a château In 2024, Israeli wineries bought one. The direction of aspiration has completely reversed. So the quality war was won in Israel, in France, on every continent the model touched. All of it built carefully, deliberately, for Jewish tables. And then something happened that nobody planned, nobody predicted, and nobody in the fine wine world saw coming. The rest of the world started drinking kosher wine by the tens of millions of bottles. And the wine that led that invasion wasn't a Cabernet from a classified château. It was small, sweet, fizzy and blue. You all know the bottle, even if you've never bought one. You know it. Squat, cobalt blue, sitting in the door of half of the refrigerators in the Jewish world, and as it turns out, a great many refrigerators beyond it. Bartonura Moscato. And before we get to how it conquered the planet, savor the name for a second. There's a hidden Torah lesson printed on every one of those party bottles. Bartenura is named for Rabbi Ovadia of Bartenuro in Italy, the 15th century sage whose commentary sits besides the Mishnah on every bookshelf in the yeshiva world, the man who left the comfort of Italy and journeyed for years to rebuild the Jewish community of Jerusalem. Royal Wine put his name on their Italian label back in 1978 when it was a quiet line of Valpolicella and Suave, which means that today when that blue bottle turns up chilling in an ice bucket in a music video. And it does. It carries quietly the name of the Mishnah's great commentator. I find that combination completely irresistible. I suspect Rav Avadiah, who walked across the world for the love of his people, would at least smile. So how did a rabbi's label become a pop culture phenomenon? Step by step, and none of them planned. In the early '90s, Royal added a Moscato d'Asti to its line, the gently sparkling, low-alcohol, sweet wine of Piedmont. A few thousand cases, an afterthought. Then in 1993 came the accident of genius. The blue bottle. The Italian authorities were not amused. Proper Asti glass is green, thank you very much. But the blue survived, and it turned out to be the most recognizable package in kosher wine history. You could spot it across a crowded store, across a crowded party. By 1992, the Bartenura line was already the best-selling brand in the kosher sector. And then the wine did something no kosher wine had ever done— it left the neighborhood. 2005, Lil' Kim name checks the blue bottle in a song, and the kosher wine enters hip-hop. Not as a joke, as a flex. What followed over the next two decades belongs in a marketing textbook. Rappers, playlists, Instagram, the blue bottle as the affordable celebration wine of America. Today, Bartonora sells more than 10 million bottles a year in dozens of countries. And here is the number I want you to hold: roughly 85% of it is bought by people who aren't Jewish. Now, if you've been listening closely tonight, that number should give you kind of déjà vu. Chapter 1, Manischewitz, mid-'50s, 80% non-Jewish drinkers. History is rhyming, but listen to the difference between the verses. America drank Manischewitz as a cheap, sweet curiosity, despite the kosher label. The world drinks Bartenura as a real Moscato from the hills of Asti, a genuine Italian wine that happens to be kosher. Same crossover, opposite direction of respect. And there's one more rhyme. The best-selling kosher wine on Earth, then and now, is sweet and it's white. File that away, it matters in about 4 or 5 minutes. And the blue bottle is just the loudest example of something much bigger. The kosher market has quietly become the wine industry's strangest success story. You've heard the gloomy headlines: wine consumption in America is shrinking, down something like 12%, every category sliding except one— kosher wine is growing. Royal's longtime marketing chief, Jay Buchsbaum, put it this way, and you can hear the almost apologetic shrug to it: By Royal's own standards, it wasn't a great year, but we did have an increase, whereas the industry has declined by as much as 12%. Think about the reversal hiding in that sentence. For a century, kosher wine was the market's embarrassing corner. Now it's the corner that's growing while the house shrinks. Why? Partly because the wine got good. You've spent 4 chapters hearing how. Partly demographics. Kosher consumers buy wine every single week of the year, not just for parties. Remember Chapter 1, when half of the category sales came in the first 3 months before Pesach. That seasonality has been flattening into 52 weeks of Kiddush. And partly new friends. There is now a real and growing Christian market for Israeli and kosher wine. Communities who buy a bottle from the Galilee or the Judean hills as an act of connection to the land. And partly, and I'll say this gently, because of the war. Since October 7th, 2023, with vineyards shelled and harvests brought in under fire, Jewish communities from around the world have been buying Israeli wine deliberately, table by table, as solidarity you can pour. The market grew in the hardest years the industry has ever known. That is not a statistic, that's a family showing up. If you want to see all of it in one room, come to New Jersey in February. The Kosher Food and Wine Experience, KFWE. When the story started, there was no such thing as a kosher trade tasting. The first KFW was held in 2007. This past February, the 20th edition filled the Hotel Ballroom in East Rutherford with close to 1,000 kosher wines and spirits. Château owners from Bordeaux next to kibbutz winemakers from the Golan. Sommeliers from Manhattan restaurants working the aisles. The Blue Bottle and the 100-point Cabernet under the same roof. 30 years ago, you could have fit every serious kosher wine on Earth on two folding tables. I'm telling you, the ballroom is the statistic. Everything else is a footnote. But volume is one kind of victory, and it isn't the deepest kind. 10 million blue bottles proved the world would drink kosher wine. It didn't answer the connoisseur's question, the quiet one, the one this whole episode has been circling. With the training wheels off, at the very top of its game, No asterisks. How good can kosher wine actually be? The answer arrived this last decade and came from a direction almost nobody was watching. Not the great reds, the whites. Let me tell you a secret hiding in plain sight across the entire episode. Go back to 1995, to the wines the critics could actually praise without flinching. Baron Herzog's Chenin Blanc, Ernie Weir's Riesling, the one poured at the White House, Garnier Squirt's Traminer, and the best-selling kosher wine in the world— sweet, fizzy, blue-bottled Moscato. Notice anything? They're all whites. That was no accident. Remember the boiling from Chapter 1, the mevushal treatment that flattened wines? Here's the mechanism nobody talked about. Heat is crueler to reds than whites. A red's soul lives in its structure, tannins, depth. The architecture— you age for 20 years, and cooking can wreck that architecture. But a crisp, aromatic white, drunk young, served cold, built on fruit and acidity— it could survive the process with most of its charm intact. So in the exile years, whites were the honest quality of kosher wines, the workhorses, the wines without excuses. And then we forgot them for 20 years, roughly 1995 to 2015. Everything you've heard tonight— the trophies, the châteaus, the conversions— was a red wine story. The Cabernet arms race. Prestige meant dark, oaked, and expensive. Ketzrin, Grand Vin, Yatir Forest, kosher Pouliak. Seriousness worn purple. Whites kept the Shabbat table company and got precisely zero respect for it. In 2006, A kosher white burgundy was so rare it was essentially undocumented. The category's oldest strength had become invisible. So here's what makes this decade astonishing: the whites came back, and not quietly. David Raka, probably the most read critic in the kosher wine world, declared it outright. We are living, he wrote, in the era of peak kosher white, an almost never-ending list of serious white wines. His words. And then came the numbers that would have been unthinkable in any earlier chapter of this story, when Royal's French portfolio, the house that built its name on on kosher Bordeaux was reviewed top to bottom last year. 12 of the 14 whites scored 87 points or better. And the weakest category in the entire lineup? The reds. Sit with that. In a portfolio built around claret, the whites now outshine the Bordeaux. The pyramid didn't just grow, it flipped. And look at the map. Those whites are written across the kosher Chablis, the two Sancerres we met in France, kosher Tokay out of Hungary. And in Israel, what wine critics reach for first these days are whites— the Katzrin Chardonnay, Soraz Chorèche Blanc showing off its limestone minerality, a Roussanne grown in the Judean hills, and my favorite Mosel, a project called Geffen HaShalom, the Vines of Peace, in which Nick Weiss of St. Urbanshof and Van Hovel Estate in the Saar did something with almost unbearable historic weight. They brought kosher Mosel Riesling back to the world, the first exported to America since the Second World War. Think about what a great Riesling even is. Transparency, slate, white peach, a nerve of acidity like light through water, a wine that hides nothing. From those hills in this century under that name, Vine of Peace. I don't know a more quietly moving bottle in the entire kosher world. Now, in the first chapter, I made you a promise that the boiling, the very thing that broke kosher wine's reputation, would come back transformed. Here it is. The technology is called flash détente, and it sounds like science fiction. The crushed grapes are flash heated, skins and all, towards boiling for moments, and then plunged into a vacuum chamber where they're cooled instantly Halachically, the wine is mevushal, cooked right there at the juice stage. The ancient category from Tractate Avodah Zarah fully satisfied. But here's the twist the sages could not have seen coming. Winemakers discovered the process has benefits. It deepens color. It strips out green, weedy off-flavors. Used well, it's not a penalty anymore, it's a tool. Raka's list of the top Mevushal wines of 2024 scores 92, 93 points, the best Mevushal scores ever recorded. I want to be honest, it's not magic. Delicate whites can still lose a step in the process. And the finest bottles in this chapter are proudly non-mevushal. But step back and look at the shape of the thing. The tradition itself argued for centuries about cooked wine. The R'mah in Shulchan Aruch records the dispute about whether mevushal wines may be even used for kiddush. And he rules that it may. And then he adds something. That tonight of all nights reads like prophecy. If the cooked wine is the better wine, it takes precedence. The halacha itself says this: when the improved wine is superior, you honor Shabbat with the improved wine. 500 years before Flash Datan, the Rima wrote this episode's thesis: into the Shulchan Aruch. Because that argument, that constraint, is precisely what forced kosher winemakers to out-engineer everyone else. I told you at the top of the night, the constraint became the engine. This is what I meant. That's not just a wine story. That's the most Jewish story there is. Which brings us at last to Bordeaux, 2009, and the story I promised the connoisseurs in the very first minute of tonight's show. The château is Smith Haut Lafitte in Pessac-Léognan. It's 2009, a legendary vintage in a legendary year. Received from Robert Parker the score every winemaker on Earth dreams about: 100 points. Perfect. And here is the part that almost nobody knows. In that same cellar, in that same vintage, there were kosher barrels, a kosher cuvée of Smith Haut Lafitte 2009, made on the site by a French kosher crew supervised by the chief winemaker of Royal Wine Europe, a man named Pierre Miodownik. Yes, him again, the same hands as the first Rothschild cuvée in '86. Kedem carried that wine to the world. But understand what the record says and what it doesn't. The 100 points belong to the château's own lots. The kosher barrels stood beside Perfection—same cellar, same vintage, same fruit, one door away—and the score was never theirs. For 17 years That was the closest kosher wine ever came. One cellar door. And then in June 2026, last month, the door opened. It didn't open in Bordeaux. It opened in Berkeley, California, in an urban winery between the freeway and the bay. And the man standing in it is the one I I promised you in the introduction. Jeff Morgan, a former senior editor at Wine Spectator, a man who tasted for a living at the top of the wine world, who walked away from the magazine and with his friend Leslie Rudd bet his reputation on an idea most of his colleagues found charming at best that kosher wine could be made with no compromises at all, no shortcuts, and for his flagship, no cooking of any kind. He founded Covenant in 2003, and in June 2026, Decanter tasted his 2023 Solomon Simon Lot 70. A Cabernet Sauvignon, kosher non-mevushal, from a winery that has never made anything but kosher wine, and gave it 100 points. Pour that wine in your mind with me. Nearly opaque at the center, garnet at the rims, cassis and black cherry, so pure they feel carved rather than grown. Graphite and cedar underneath, a base note of warm earth, tannins like pressed velvet, firm, ripe, endless, and a finish that doesn't fade so much as recede the way a tide does, promising to return. No asterisk, no for a kosher wine. No door between it and perfection. The first 100-point score ever awarded to a kosher wine itself, and it came from a kosher-only house. The flyer said 2 bottles for $5. The score sheet says perfect. That is the whole 30 years poured into one glass. So the walk is complete. The Concord kept the faith. Israel settled the argument. France opened its châteaux. The world bought the blue bottle. The whites came home. And the kosher Cabernet touched the ceiling we were told for generations wasn't ours to touch. Which leaves only one question: Maybe the only question our tradition was always going to ask at a moment like this: What blessing do you say when the second cup is better than the first? There is a blessing for this. That's the astonishing thing. Our tradition, which has a blessing for thunder, for rainbows, For seeing the ocean. Also wrote a blessing for one specific moment at the table. The Gemara teaches it in Tractate Brachot, and the Shulchan Aruch codifies it in the Orach Chaim, chapter 175. On the first cup of wine, we say what we always say, Orei pri hagefen. But if the second wine then comes to the table— listen to the conditions— a different wine than the first, a wine that is not inferior to the first, and you're not drinking alone— then and only then you say a blessing that exists for no other food in the entire tradition. Baruch atah Hashem, Elokeinu melech olam, hatov v'hametiv. Who is good and who does good. A blessing reserved for the moment the second cup is better than the first, and there's someone beside you to share it. Now hold those three conditions up there. To the 30 years we just walked together. A second wine, different from the first. Do we have that? The first cup was a Concord, Brooklyn sweet, purple and faithful. The second cup is a 100-point Cabernet from Berkeley, a Riesling from Mosel called Vine of Peace, a Grenacha from a Catalan village that waited 500 years. I'd say that's a different wine, not inferior to the first. And here, for the first time in our history, we get to smile at the condition itself. For generations, that clause was the problem. 30 years ago, the second bottle in a kosher home was rarely better. There was no better. Tonight, the second cup ties the highest scores on Earth. And the third condition: you must not be drinking alone. But then, kosher wine was never once allowed to be drunk alone. That was the whole point, all the way back in the very beginning of this episode. The law itself was a fence around the shared table. This is the wine of Kiddush heard by a family, of 4 cups at a crowded seder, of sheva brachot passed hand to hand, of a diaspora buying Israeli bottles in wartime. Solidarity. You can pour. Company isn't a condition we have to meet. It's the one condition we never once failed. And the sages sealed that into the very grammar of the blessing: HaTov, who is good to me, V'HaMeitiv, who does good to others. It is a blessing you cannot by definition say alone. And before we bless the second cup, I want to be very careful about the first one, because the first wine was never bad. The first wine was faithful. That heavy purple bottle on my grandparents' table On yours did exactly what it was asked to do every Friday night in a country where our grapes wouldn't grow and our wine wasn't welcome. It kept the covenant. It held the door. And the second cup— the Sancerre, the Solomon Simon Jacob Jacob's Lot 70, the flower of spring. Is not a replacement for it. It is the same faithfulness poured wider. The Rima saw all of this 500 years ago. Remember, when the improved wine is superior, he ruled, you honor Shabbat with the improved wine. You don't apologize for it, you raise it. I'm a wannabe winemaker. You know that about me by now. I'm the man at the table. 30 years of Thursday nights standing in wine shops, 30 years of Friday nights lifting the cup. And I can tell you the exact feeling this episode is about. It's the feeling of pouring something for people you love and realize mid-pour that nobody at the table will ever again have to say, "It's good," for a kosher wine. Our generation got handed something no Jewish generation before us ever held: the second cup. We didn't earn it alone. It was pressed for us by a family in Oxnard, a co-op in Catalonia, kibbutzim on a volcanic plateau, a Frenchman in Médoc, an editor and his family in Berkeley who walked away from the magazine. All we asked to do is what Jews have always done with a full cup: lift it, bless it, and share it. So here is my ask for this Shabbat: open something you could not have opened in 1995— a kosher shabli, A Mosel Riesling, a white from the Judean hills with a real minerality, or a Cabernet from the Galil grown under fire and finished in hope. Pour the first cup and say agafen slowly for the century of concord that carried us here. Then open the second bottle a different one, a better one. Look around and see if you can find a 2023 Covenant Cabernet Sauvignon Lot 70 that got 100 points. What a special bracha you can make on that wine. And then look around at the people sharing it and say the blessing. And here, let me tell you something personal. The books treat a Tovah HaMetiv as a rare blessing, and for most of our history it was. Our great-grandparents could go years between occasions. Where was the second, better bottle supposed to come from? Well, not at my table. My custom is to say Hatov V'hametiv between every wine we drink. Every new bottle. Every different pour. Because that is how thankful I am to Hashem for the selection He has laid in front of this generation. Stop and hear how astonishing that is. A blessing the tradition kept on the shelf for centuries, waiting for an abundance that never came. And today there is so much good wine at one table that I cannot stop saying it. So I will not end this episode gently. Say the words this Shabbat and mean every syllable of the claim they make: HaTov, he is good, v'haMeitiv, he does good. Not did, does. Present tense. This vintage, your table, this week. 30 years ago, kosher wine was 2 bottles for $5. Today it's 100 points. Perfect, no asterisks. 2 bottles for $5 was the exile. 100 points is the homecoming, and the blessing was sitting in the shul hanorchah the whole time, waiting for us to have a reason. We have the reason. Say it loud. L'chaim and Shabbat Shalom. This is Solomon Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Teruah. 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