In a warehouse in northwest Berkeley, Covenant winery looks much like any other winery — well, at least any other urban-warehouse winery. Walk in and you’ll see racks of barrels, lab equipment, a tidy tasting room behind a glass wall.

You probably wouldn’t think twice about the steel gate that leads from the warehouse entrance into the barrel area. Yet that gate is possibly the crucial element of the winery. Fortressing the barrels, it ensures that only Sabbath-observant Jews can access the wines in the stages before they reach the bottle.

Covenant is a kosher winery — a designation that, in practice, means a lot less than you might imagine.

What makes wine kosher? “Simply one thing: who touches the wine,” explains Jeff Morgan, Covenant’s owner. “This is a symbolic gesture.”

Kosher wines are made exactly as any other wine, except they must be handled only by Jews who qualify as “Sabbath-observant” — meaning they keep kosher, attend synagogue and follow tenets such as observing high holidays. It doesn’t apply to grapes, which are not considered as sacred as wine; anyone can pick them off the vine. But as soon as they’re crushed, the touch rules kick in.

Morgan and his wife, Jodie, are not themselves Sabbath-observant — the children of “confused Jews,” he says, they grew up secular in New York — so they rely on their more-religious staff, led by winemaker Jonathan Hajdu, to do all the touching and moving of wine. That includes extracting samples from the barrel, hitting the “on” and “off” buttons on the bottling machine and, at the end of every day, closing that steel gate. The Morgans don’t even have a key.

A few times a year, kosher-certifying organizations will stop by the winery, unannounced, to check that they’re going by the book. Covenant has the Orthodox Union hechsher — that little logo depicting the “U” in a circle that graces all sorts of products, including Coca-Cola and Lay’s chips — as well as a stricter, more “boutique” hechsher from Rabbi Babad in Brooklyn.

Those tiny marks, however, are the only clues you’ll find on a Covenant bottle that the wine is kosher. Morgan doesn’t want to limit his customer base to only kosher-keeping Jews; he believes his wines can appeal to all wine lovers. “Knowing it’s kosher is only important to those to whom it is important,” he says. “‘Kosher’ is not the qualitative measurement.”

Until relatively recently, kosher wine did convey a qualitative measurement to many drinkers: a bad one.

Back to Gallery In Berkeley, kosher wine gets back to its roots 14 1 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 5 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 6 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 7 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 8 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 9 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 10 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 11 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 12 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 13 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 14 of 14 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle



























The conversation about “why is kosher wine so bad?” inevitably turns to Manischewitz. And the answer is simple: Manischewitz is bad because it is made from Concord grapes, a species of Vitis labrusca — not Vitis vinifera, the European grape species that produces the only types of wine worth drinking. (Sorry, lovers of Catawba from Pennsylvania, but it’s true.)

In America, the old-school kosher wine brands, like Manischewitz and Kedem, were founded in New York (where else?), where the only grapes available were non-vinifera cultivars — like Concord.

Concord grapes taste fine as juice (I’ve got nothing against Welch’s), but once fermented they taste foxy and skunky. The only way to make the wine palatable, therefore, was to mask its off-flavors with lots of sugar.

“And that’s where the idea of sweet kosher wines came from,” says Joseph Herzog, whose grandfather created Kedem. “Even today, many Jews think those sweet wines are traditional.” Though they continue to operate Kedem, in 1985 the Herzogs established a winery in Oxnard (Ventura County), where they make high-quality vinifera wines from all over the state. They own Royal Wine Corp., the largest importer and distributor of kosher wine in the world.

Kosher wine’s years of wandering are nearing their end. “The quality of kosher wines has vastly improved over the last 10 years,” says Bob Paulinski, senior vice president of wine for BevMo!, which carries about three dozen kosher SKUs. “A lot of it has to do with consumers demanding better-quality wine across every channel, whether it’s kosher or not.”

Herzog echoes that: “There’s been an explosion in the kosher market, especially with Millennials. They’re not just looking for cheap, sweet wine.”

Covenant is a prime example of this change. The wines aren’t just “good for kosher.” They’re just good.

Morgan lived several lives before Covenant — at one time, he played in Prince Rainier’s house band in Monte Carlo; later, he was the West Coast editor of Wine Spectator — but it was a conversation with his friend Leslie Rudd, owner of Napa’s Rudd Winery, that begat Covenant.

“We could make the best kosher wine in 5,000 years if you let me use your Cabernet,” Morgan told Rudd. Rudd said no, but was interested to see what Morgan could do. In 2003, Morgan bought some fruit from the Larkmead Vineyard and drove it seven hours to Herzog to have it vinified there. The results impressed Rudd enough that he signed on as an equal partner in Covenant. In 2014, the Morgans relocated from Napa to Berkeley and opened their winery here.

Today, the diverse Covenant lineup includes a $20 white blend and a $150 Cabernet from Rudd’s Oakville property, Sonoma Chardonnay and Lodi Zinfandel. They will always make rosé, one of Morgan’s lifelong passions (he used to own an all-rosé wine label, Solo Rosa). Since 2013, he’s also been making Rhone-inspired wines in Israel; the Covenant Israel winery will be up and running for the 2017 harvest.

“We are among a number of wineries that have raised the bar for kosher wine, making wine in an artisanal style,” Morgan says. “We’ve helped convey to our core consumers — Jews — and the rest of the world that kosher wine can be just as good as non-kosher wine.”

It does require a little bit of extra planning. At harvest time, when most wineries operate seven days a week, Covenant has to take Saturdays off. “Punchdowns are just gonna have to wait,” Morgan laughs. “It means we anticipate the problems.”

And as for those Jews who still believe that sweet Manischewitz is “traditional” for Passover, Morgan points out that Concord grapes never grew in Israel.

“I can assure you that before the destruction of second temple, they were not making Concord. It was vinifera,” he says. By making better wine, “we are getting back to our roots.”

Tasting Notes: Covenant's kosher wines and Passover pairings

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine, beer and spirits writer. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley