OXNARD, California — On Friday nights, in Jewish homes around the world, a familiar ritual unfolds: a blessing over wine, poured into a cup and passed around the table.
That ritual, multiplied during Passover, may help explain why kosher wine is holding steady even as the broader wine industry struggles.
Across the United States and globally, wine consumption is declining. Baby boomers, long the industry’s most reliable customers, are aging out of peak drinking years. Younger consumers are drinking less alcohol overall and are more likely to reach for craft beer, spirits or ready-to-drink cocktails when they do. In California, wineries have begun laying off workers, cutting production and, in some cases, shutting down altogether.
But in the kosher wine market the downturn looks more like a slowdown.
Royal Wine, the largest distributor of kosher wine in the United States, is used to seeing year-over-year growth in the double digits, according to Jay Buchsbaum, a vice president at the New Jersey-based company.
“By that standard, we did not have a great year,” he said in an interview. “But we did have an increase, whereas the industry has declined by as much as 12% so we’re bucking the trend.”
At Herzog Wine Cellars in Oxnard, California, that resilience is apparent on the production floor.
In the weeks before Passover, the busiest season of the year for kosher wine, a forklift is moving pallets across the warehouse and bottling lines are running steadily, workers are preparing shipments destined for holiday tables.
“Passover for us is what October, November and December are for the rest of the industry,” said Herzog’s winemaker David Galzignato, describing a seasonal surge that mirrors the year-end rush in most wineries.
David Galzignato, an Italian Catholic, is director of winemaking and operations at Herzog Wine Cellars, a major kosher winery. (Asaf Elia-Shalev)
Herzog is the flagship American winery of Royal Wine, which is owned by the Herzog family, an Orthodox family originally from Slovakia that has been in the business for nine generations and today dominates the kosher wine market in the United States. The scale is unusual for kosher production: Bottles range from $13 table wines to $300 Napa Valley releases, sourced from top vineyards across California.
Galzignato, an Italian Catholic who joined the winery in 2021, was brought in with a specific mandate: to elevate the quality of kosher wine.
“They wanted me to take kosher wine quality … to the same level, or better, than the non-kosher quality,” he said.
But despite overseeing every step of production, Galzignato cannot physically move the wine he makes.
Under kosher law, from the moment grape juice is released until the wine is bottled, only Shabbat-observant Jews may handle it — a requirement that shapes everything from staffing to workflow.
“It just takes a little bit more planning,” he said.
Even with those constraints, the winery has continued investing in its operations in recent years, upgrading equipment at a cost of more than $2 million and expanding production capacity at a time when many wineries are scaling back.
“When there’s a downturn companies typically pull back on investments,” Galzignato said. “But here the commitment to presenting the best kosher wine remains 100%.”
A view of the one the many vineyards supplying Herzog Wine Cellars, the flagship winery of the Royal Wine, largest distributor of kosher wines in the United States. (Courtesy)
Stability amid the wider downturn is not limited to industry giants like Royal. At Covenant, a boutique kosher winery in Berkeley, California, the trend looks similar.
“We’re actually about 5% up this year,” said Jeff Morgan, the Covenant’s founding winemaker.
Covenant helped popularize high-end kosher wine in recent decades, but Morgan credits a much older force for the staying power of his product.
“The American interest in wine is in what I would call a correction phase,” he said, describing the broader downturn as the fading of a decades-long boom driven largely by baby boomers.
In his view, wine never became fully embedded in American life.
“Americans don’t have what we would call a wine culture,” he said. “We are a nation that follows fads.”
Jewish life, by contrast, has long been structured around wine — not as a lifestyle choice, but as a ritual obligation.
“We Jews have a culture of wine,” he said. “We are pretty much obliged to drink wine.”
Covenant’s founding winemaker, Jeff Morgan. (Courtesy)
That obligation creates a built-in baseline of demand that persists regardless of broader trends.
The same dynamic is visible to those who oversee kosher production.
“We have our regular Shabbos and our regular holidays and life cycle events,” said Rabbi Nahum Rabinowitz, a senior rabbinical coordinator at the Orthodox Union who has worked on wine for more than two decades. “Those activities continue as normal. … It hasn’t really changed that much.”
Dovid Riven, who runs KosherWine.com, the largest retailer in the United States selling only kosher wines, said he expects to bring in about as much this year as he did last year.
“There’s definitely sluggishness … but not to the extent that the non-kosher industry is seeing,” he said. Instead of abandoning wine, many customers are adjusting what they buy — opting for less expensive bottles or cutting back on collecting. He also noted the widespread perception in the wine industry that young people are replacing alcohol with cannabis.
Still, he said, the ritual role of kosher wine sets a floor under demand. “Nobody’s going to sit down for their seder and smoke four joints,” he said. “You’re going to need four cups.”
The goal of the industry should be to adapt with lighter, more accessible wines and new marketing strategies aimed at younger drinkers, said Ernie Weir, co-owner of Napa Valley’s Hagafen Cellars, which was established in 1979.
“We’re not unaffected by the general trends so we must deal with them,” he said.
Wine grapes ripen on the vine, almost ready for harvest. (Courtesy of Herzog Wine Cellars)
The kosher wine business may have been spared some of the worst of the downturn in part because its consumers are still catching up to trends that reshaped the broader market years ago.
For decades, kosher wine in the United States remained associated with sweet, low-end bottles even as the general market moved toward dry, higher-quality wines. That left room for growth as consumers began trading up.
Buchsbaum argued that the kosher wine business has been spared some of the worst of the downturn in part because its consumers are “behind the general consumer” — a lag that, in this case, has worked to the market’s advantage.
For decades kosher drinkers trailed broader trends, remaining associated with sweet wines long after the general market had shifted toward dry, higher-quality bottles.
“In the past, an Orthodox or kosher-observant person would only drink a bottle of wine at the table Friday night,” Buchsbaum said. “Now he’s got two or three bottles at the table Friday night. Wow. He could have one or two during the week with his other meals. That consumer specifically has grown.”
At the same time another kind of kosher wine consumer has faded: the less observant American Jew who did not keep strictly kosher day to day but still bought kosher wine, hired kosher caterers and maintained certain communal norms around holidays and life-cycle events.
Buchsbaum described a mid-20th-century American Jewish landscape in which nearly every community had kosher butchers and caterers because even many non-Orthodox families expected bar mitzvahs, weddings and other celebrations to be kosher. That world, he said, has sharply contracted.
The result is a smaller but more engaged core market — one that is spending more per household even as casual participation declines.
“The current kosher consumer … has picked up a lot of that slack,” Buchsbaum said.
The shift in who buys kosher wine reflects a broader change in American Jewish life. As assimilation and disaffiliation have transformed the community, more observant populations have taken on a larger role.
Left to right: Mordy, David, Morris, and Joseph Herzog. (Courtesy)
Another broader trend is generating optimism among industry insiders: the growing demand for kosher wine outside the Jewish community.
Perhaps the best example is Royal’s Bartenura label, which is the best-selling premium Moscato, a sweet, aromatic white wine, in the United States, selling nearly 10 million bottles a year. Buchsbaum estimates that as little as 15% of Bartenura buyers are Jewish, with the blue-bottled wine developing a particular fan base among Black consumers.
Buchsbaum also said Royal has increasingly found customers in Christian Zionists who are drawn to Israeli wines for religious and cultural reasons. In states like Texas, he said, that audience has become a meaningful and growing segment of the market.
Royal sells to Total Wine, one of the largest wine chains in the country, which has expanded its Israeli wine offerings and actively promotes them to a broad, largely non-Jewish customer base.
“They have a tremendous Israeli wine section,” Buchsbaum said, noting that stores feature maps of Israel’s wine regions and host tastings to introduce the category to new consumers.
It also helps that Israeli producers have been earning high scores and international awards, competing alongside established wine regions in Europe and California. That recognition has helped shift perceptions of kosher wine from a religious product to a quality-driven one.
“They’ve been making wine for over 5,000 years, and they just got recognized for being good at it,” said Josh Greenstein, executive vice president of the Israeli Wine Producers Association.
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