Opinion | Why Can’t I Get the Wine I Want for Passover?

"Like many of her generation, my mother, Ethel, never outgrew Manischewitz. That liquefied grape jelly was our house wine, and she served it every week on the Sabbath and on every holiday.

Even after I stopped observing Sabbath rules myself, and made my professional life in wine, my mother could never quite grasp my desperation to find something palatable for Passover. Each year, I’d plunk down way too much money, hopes high, expectations low, ferrying the rabbi-approved bottles over to Mom’s apartment in Long Beach. Somewhere around the second cup, Ethel would ask, “You know what this needs?” and mix some of her sweet Concord with the $35 kosher Burgundy I’d brought.

I was brought up in a kosher and fairly observant household, and attended 12 years of religious school. I was raised to go to the women’s college at Yeshiva University, not Stony Brook, and I certainly wasn’t supposed become a wine writer. But I did both of those things. And almost 20 years ago, I dedicated myself to the cause of natural wine: organic viticulture with none of the more than 70 legal additives — things like yeast, bacteria, tannin, acid, anti-foaming agents and wood chips — that may be present in most wines, kosher or otherwise. The secular bottles I drink are mostly made from one ingredient: grapes.

Natural wine is unpredictable. It boasts a huge variation in flavors. The winemaker’s goal is to translate the place the grapes come from into the glass, and each bottle carries an imprint of what happened the year it was made. These wines bear no resemblance to conventional or kosher wines that often follow a cookie-cutter path, full of additives to get them there. Those wines are not ones I want to sip at the holiday or any table".