Kosher wine in the twentieth century: from sweet to dry
Why kosher wine was associated with sweetness for generations, and what changed from the 1980s.
In the United States kosher wine meant sweet Concord wine for several generations. The reason is technical: Concord is a vitis labrusca grape native to the north-east, cheap and hardy but sharp, and sugar was the only way to make it drinkable.
The B. Manischewitz Company was founded in 1888 by Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz, and it made matzah. Wine under the name appeared only around 1935, when Meyer Robinson, co-owner of the Monarch Wine Company, proposed selling his wine under licence using the established name. During Prohibition some Jewish winemakers held dispensation to continue production for religious purposes and so met repeal ready to expand. The American market was long divided between Manischewitz, Kedem and Mogen Dovid.
Worth adding that this was an Ashkenazi phenomenon. In the Sephardi communities of Morocco, and later France, people drank dry wine, because dry wine was what surrounded them.
In parallel, Baron Edmond de Rothschild's project was unfolding in Palestine. Precision matters here, because the conventional date misleads. Carmel is conventionally dated to 1882, but that is the year the Baron became involved and the first experimental vineyards were planted; the first winery, Rishon Le Zion Cellars, was built in 1890, the second at Zichron Ya'akov in the early 1890s, and the name Carmel was first used in 1896, and then for an export marketing company. By the early 1890s some 2,200 hectares were under vine. In 1900 wine from Rishon LeZion took a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition alongside the 1899 vintages of Lafite and Margaux; that same year the Baron stepped back from personally directing the colonies.
The turn to quality began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Hagafen and Baron Herzog appeared in California with the declared aim of raising the bar. Carmel and Royal Wine pivoted towards dry wines, pushed by small pioneering estates including the Golan Heights Winery. The next shift came in 2003 with Covenant, which in 2008 took on its first full-time Sabbath-observant winemaker.
Today wines are made kosher in Bordeaux, Tuscany, Catalonia, California and Argentina, and in a blind tasting kosher wine is indistinguishable from non-kosher, because kashrut governs who handles the wine, not how it is made.