Aged to Perfection

When Jeff Morgan decided to create the best kosher wine in 5,000 years, it was more than a vintner’s competition. For the wine guru who initially knew nothing about kosher except that wine needed a mashgiach, handling the sacred beverage eventually intoxicated his own thirsty soul.

The Events Room at Chelsea Pier is a long carpeted space which having been built onto a pier gives visitors the impression of floating on an ocean liner. The floor-to-ceiling windows look out over choppy gray waters and boats and a tiny Statue of Liberty is just barely visible in the distance. Today for the 2013 Kosher Wine and Food Expo the room is packed with table upon table of kosher wine and spirits producers and noisy with the clinking of wine glasses and conversation you could call “spirited” in more ways than one.

At a small table near the main entrance stands the coterie from a small kosher winery in theNapaValleycalled Covenant. They don’t proffer a huge selection; there are bottles of red and white wine marked with a large stylized red C and other bottles bearing a colorful label reminiscent of a Chagall stained-glass window. These beauties don’t go cheaply. The special “Red C” (play on words about the biblical miracle

entirely intentional) retails for $45 while the Covenant Cabernet Sauvignon is valued at $100 a bottle.

Covenant’s owner Jeff Morgan is there shaking hands and smiling looking elated to be among fellow Jewish wine enthusiasts. Tall and thin in a light-colored suit and cowboy boots he has a trimmed graying beard and a yarmulke rests on top of his close-cropped hair. Morgan has thin refined features with round black eyes that suggest a certain intelligence and depth. Jeff Morgan is a man with a mission: He wants to produce the best kosher wine in the last 5 000 years. While many people find their connection back to Judaism in an oblique manner — via an interest in music history or spirituality —in Jeff’s case it seems divinely ordained that the deep affinity he developed for wine would one day be the key to unlocking his Jewish soul. In the process he has lit new lamps for kosher winemakers seeking to raise their craft to global standards.