What will the public say about this $380 kosher wine?

The first wine I tasted when I was a child was Really wine. It was Manischewitz. It’s sweet and syrupy, made from Concord grapes, and served to me in small quantities every year on Passover.

I hated it as much as I hated gefilte fish.

Thankfully, I hadn’t drunk Manischewitz in years, as the kosher wine market has exploded since the early 2000s. Kosher wine is reportedly continuing to grow despite the downturn in the wine industry, with many high-quality options now available from producers such as Berkeley’s Covenant and Napa’s Mayacamas, making $215 kosher Cabernet Sauvignon. Still, it’s hard to shake the stigma of kosher wine as cheap, sugary, and just plain awful.

That may finally start to change, as kosher wine has reached its peak and reached cult status in Napa Valley.

The idea of ​​paying $380 for a bottle of wine on Passover, or about $56 for each of the four glasses of wine required during the seder, would outrage buddies across America. (A bottle of Manischewitz costs about $8.) Still, King’s Mark, an ultra-premium kosher Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon made by the region’s most famous winemaking duo, Philip Melka and Mayan Kositsky, is a revelation in kosher wine and conclusive proof that “K” certification has nothing to do with quality.

Kingsmark founder Whitney Skivel created the wine in honor of her late uncle Leslie Ladd, a Napa wine and food mogul who founded Covenant in 2003 with winemaker Jeff Morgan. “My uncle always said, ‘Why can’t there be kosher wines that can compete with the best wines in the world? Why can’t kosher wines be as good as Screaming Eagle or Bond or Colgin?'” she said. “It should be just as good.”

So Skivel hired the very winemakers behind Napa’s cult Cabernet brand and sourced grapes from top Napa Valley locations, including Rutherford’s George III, owned by famed winemaker Andy Beckstoffer. Skivel said she hired a heraldic artist who worked with the Royal Family to create the ornate golden emblem on the label, and the wine is packaged in an “incredible gift box.”

There is virtually no difference in the winemaking process between kosher fine wine and non-kosher fine wine. (Some cheaper kosher wines are called “meshvar,” which is flash-cooked at high temperatures and then cooled.) The main rule is that kosher wine, from crushing to bottling, must be handled by a rabbi or a Sabbath-observant Jew, a Jewish man who observes the weekly Jewish Sabbath from Friday night through Saturday. For Kingsmarck, this means Melka and Kositsky make all the winemaking decisions, while Sabbath-observant Jews (aligned with the Orthodox Union) carry out instructions such as adding yeast and transferring the wine from tank to barrel. Most wineries with multiple people on cellar staff operate this way anyway. In many cases, the head winemaker is not doing the heavy lifting.

Since its launch in 2024, Kingsmark has been featured on the wine lists of several fine dining restaurants, including The French Laundry and Jean-Georges in New York City., Spago at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Little Nell in Aspen. This is the first solo wine project for Skivel, whose family has been in the wine and spirits business for five generations. In the late 1800s, her great-great-grandfather started a barrel brewery in Colorado and was “one of the first people to deliver beer in kegs to Coors,” she said. Her grandfather was the third person to receive a liquor license in Kansas after Prohibition ended.

Kingsmark is not a Shabbat wine or a Passover wine for most Jews, but it has found its niche as a special occasion bottle, a splurge reserved for important Jewish religious junctures such as weddings, offerings, Jewish circumcisions and naming ceremonies.

But the biggest proof of King’s Mark’s success, according to Skibel, is that many of its buyers are not Jewish. They are cabernet collectors from Napa. “At the end of the day, it’s a fine, kosher-certified Cabernet made by a world-renowned winemaker,” she said.