Kingsmark, an ultra-premium Kosher Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley, costs $380 a bottle.
Jess Lander/The Chronicle
The first wine I ever tasted, as a child, was not really wine. It was Manischewitz: sweet, syrupy, made from Concord grapes and served to me in tiny amounts at Passover each year.
I hated it, almost as much as I hated gefilte fish.
I haven’t had Manischewitz in years, thankfully, because the Kosher wine market has exploded since the early 2000s. There are now many high-quality options from producers like Berkeley’s Covenant or Napa’s Mayacamas, which makes a $215 Kosher Cabernet Sauvignon, and Kosher wines reportedly continue to see growth despite the wine industry downturn. Still, the stigma against Kosher wines — that they’re cheap, sugary and overall terrible — has been hard to shake.
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That could finally start to change, for Kosher wine has reached a pinnacle: Napa Valley cult status.
The idea of paying $380 for a bottle of wine for Passover, or roughly $56 per cup for the four required during the seder, will make bubbies across America verklempt. (A bottle of Manischewitz costs about $8.) Yet Kingsmark, an ultra-premium, Kosher Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon made by the region’s most famous winemaking duo, Philippe Melka and Mayaan Koschitzky, is a revelation for Kosher wine and definitive proof that the “K” certification has no bearing on quality.
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Kingsmark founder Whitney Skibell created the wine in honor of her late uncle, Napa wine and food magnate Leslie Rudd, who started Covenant in 2003 with winemaker Jeff Morgan. “My uncle would always say, ‘Why isn’t there a Kosher wine that would stand among the finest wines of the world? Why couldn’t a Kosher wine be just as good as Screaming Eagle or Bond or Colgin?’” she said. “It should be just as good.”
So, Skibell hired the very winemakers who are most often behind Napa’s cult Cabernet brands, and sourced grapes from premier Napa Valley sites, including Georges III in Rutherford, owned by renowned wine grower Andy Beckstoffer. She hired a heraldic artist who has done work for the Royal Family to create the ornate golden crest on the label, and the wine comes packaged in an “incredible gift box,” Skibell said.
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There is virtually no difference in the winemaking process between Kosher fine wine and non-Kosher fine wine. (Some cheap Kosher wines are “meshuval,” flash-cooked at high temperatures and then cooled down.) The main rule is that from crush to bottling, Kosher wine must be handled by a rabbi or Sabbath-observant Jew — someone who observes the weekly Jewish Sabbath from Friday evening through Saturday. For Kingsmark, this means that Melka and Koschitzky make all the winemaking decisions, while a Sabbath-observant Jew (coordinated with the Orthodox Union) carries out their direction, adding yeast or moving wine from tank to barrel, for example. This is how most wineries with more than one person on their cellar crew operate anyway; often, the head winemakers aren’t doing the heavy lifting.
Since launching in 2024, Kingsmark has made its way onto the wine list of several fine dining spots, including the French Laundry, New York City’s Jean-Georges, Spago at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Little Nell in Aspen. It’s the first solo wine project for Skibell, whose family has been in the wine and spirits business for five generations. In the late 1800s, her great-great-grandfather started a cooperage in Colorado and “was one of the first people to deliver beer in barrels to Coors,” she said. Her grandfather was the third person to get an alcohol license in Kansas once Prohibition ended.
Kingsmark isn’t an every-Sabbath wine, or even an every-Passover wine for most Jews, but it has found its niche as a special occasion bottle, a splurge reserved for important milestones that, per the Jewish religion, require wine, such as a wedding or a bris, the Jewish circumcision and naming ceremony.
The greatest testament to Kingsmark’s success, though, is that, according to Skibell, many of its buyers aren’t Jewish. They’re Napa Cabernet collectors. “At the end of the day,” she said, “it’s a luxury Cabernet made by world-renowned winemakers that is Kosher certified.”
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