Kosher USA by Roger Horowitz

Author:Roger Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS070120, Business & Economics/Industries/Food Industry, SOC049000, Social Science/Jewish Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

PASSOVER, AGAIN

Attending my mother’s 2010 Passover Seder, the last one before her death, we were able to enjoy a wide range of kosher wines to complement our meal. After getting ready for the service with glasses of slivovitz, we experimented with several French Burgundies and a California Cabernet as we celebrated, in the way we had for forty years, the Jewish exodus from Egypt. Elijah certainly would have had a fine wine to sip if he entered when we opened the door for him, certainly better than the days when Manischewitz or Mogen David filled his cup. And with the discussion naturally turning to my kosher food book, which seemed to be taking so long to complete, my mother reflected on the extensive selection of kosher wine in her neighborhood liquor store.

The family Seder moved to my southeastern Pennsylvania home after her death in 2011; obtaining kosher wine for those events was a far different experience than in Manhattan. Pennsylvania’s state liquor stores in my area scarcely seemed to notice the existence of dry kosher wine, and the private wine stores in nearby northern Delaware relegated kosher wine to an obscure section in the back where it battled organic and local wines for shelf space. Kedem’s Baron Herzog reds were for sale and offered a welcome alternative to Manischewitz, but it is doubtful that the stores’ non-Jewish patrons even noticed that kosher wine was available unless they stumbled across it looking for other unusual varieties defined by how they were made rather than where they were from.

My personal experience indicates how kosher wine’s great contemporary success providing quality wine for the Jewish market took place alongside its marginalization in non-Jewish circles. Sales figures, to the extent available, show that dry kosher wine was far less able than Manischewitz and Mogen David to attract non-Jewish consumers. While Kedem does not make its annual sales public, journalistic accounts give a rough picture in 2010: around 1 million gallons of grape juice, 1.5 to 3 million gallons of traditional Concord grape wine, .5 million gallons of dry kosher wine from its Oxnard plant, and an unknown quantity imported from its many international affiliates. Taking the highest estimates and assuming that imports were equal to Kedem’s entire domestic production of dry kosher wine gives annual sales of 5 million gallons—half of total kosher wine production in the early 1950s and far less than Manischewitz’s peak output of 13 million gallons in the late 1970s. Indeed, industry estimates in 2010 of a $28 million national market for kosher wines are still less than half the value of Manischewitz’s wine sales in 1979—even if the effect of inflation is ignored.53

Kosher wine’s visibility faded even more dramatically than its consumption by non-Jews. A 1957 survey of five hundred people in New York City, Los Angeles, and Detroit, composed equally of Jews, white gentiles, and African Americans, showed an astonishing awareness of Manischewitz: 72 percent recalled seeing a Manischewitz advertisement on television, almost half had heard a radio spot, and one-third remembered a newspaper advertisement.

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