One of the begging questions that emerged from a tasting of (mostly) California wines yesterday in Houston was why do people think that kosher wines are inferior to treyf wines?
It just so happens that all the wines poured, by the excellent urban winery Covenant in Berkeley, California, were kosher.
Nearly everyone present had already tasted at least one Covenant wine: each of the tasters were part of a recent judging panel where said winery was a contender. There was no question that the wines in question were high-quality and expressive of the California where they were grown and vinified.
But the conundrum remained. In the perception of most consumers, kosher wines can’t be as good as conventional wines.
I’ll leave the parsing of what makes a wine kosher to the wineries and their minyans (pun intended). But in my experience, it’s the way that kosher wines have been marketed over generations in this country that has cultured the misconception.
Most American-Ashkenazi Jews my age had parents who rarely drank. Our generation, X, of U.S. Jews is arguably the first to become wine lovers. My wine appreciation didn’t begin to develop until after I finished grad school, for example.
Until that point, I believed, like most American wine enthusiasts, that kosher wines were limited to the “contains up to 50 percent grape product” wines that were heavily marketed to us through the ubiquitous — and one might say, insidious — presence of one brand.
But the renewal of interest in viticulture has reshaped wine enthusiasm among middle class Jews just as it has the rest of bourgeois America.
Covenant has been making high-end kosher wines in California and Israel for two decades now. And their popularity in Texas is growing rapidly. (Like so many misconceptions about my adoptive state, there is a widespread, erroneous belief that there aren’t many Jews here. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Just visit the Houston neighborhood where we live!)
The wines were delicious, fresh and food friendly. Unless someone had told you otherwise, they wouldn’t taste Jewish at all.
May everyone have a peaceful Sabbath this weekend! Shabbat shalom, yall!
Do Bianchi 
1. The obvious. One that does not keep kosher does not need to seek out kosher.
2. Kosher winemakers always strive to emulate non-kosher winemakers, never the reverse.
3. The past Jewish empathy to support Jews is over as the world reactions to the October 07, 2023, holocaust in Israel have shown.
4. Most dry kosher wines are high in alcohol and have the jammy, fruity taste of most popular California wines.
5. The largest distributor of kosher food and wines outside of Israel is the manufacturer and distributor of the products they compete against. They control the narrative.
6. Only younger religious Jews drink dry kosher wines, and funding is starting to become limited. They switched to hard liquors and Tequila trends.