Eat the City(82)

Meyer and Leo planned their business adroitly. They purchased equipment at bankruptcy sales, as a previous generation of kosher winemakers went bust after Prohibition. When they decided they needed a memorable brand name, they thought of Manischewitz. It was a solid, respected company in the Jewish world, named for a man who had slaughtered meat under a famed Lithuanian rabbi and who had arrived in the United States in 1886 to build a matzoh empire—one of the first trusted national Jewish brands. And so Meyer and Leo cut a deal with Manischewitz Food Products, Inc. The Monarch Wine Company would use the Manischewitz name on its labels and pay a royalty on every bottle sold—the wine company is still paying today.

Manischewitz wine hit the market in an optimistic era when consumption and aspiration were rising. New York was the richest, biggest city in the world. Women wore new minks, men drove new cars, and all night long, the office towers of mid-Manhattan left the lights on, so their “glowing reflections hung like a canopy on the air when clouds were low.” The subject of wine was approached with diffidence, and even the fashionable Cotillion Room at the Pierre Hotel was insecure enough to include this note on the wine list: “We have been fortunate in having the help of a Grand Officer of the noble ‘Confrerie des Chevaliers du Taste Vin,’ who assures us that many of the wines are of the type one finds in the great cellars of Europe.” Wine snobbery was pervasive enough to be mocked. “It’s a na?ve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption,” wrote one humorist.

Meyer and Leo had moved wine production in 1939 from Wooster Street to the Bush Terminal, a vast commercial and industrial complex along the Brooklyn waterfront, where they were able to build a highly automated production facility, far from the bubbis back on the Lower East Side. Monarch processing plants in upstate New York pressed the grapes into juice, froze it, and stored it until it was needed in the city winery. Most wineries spring into action once a year, during the grape harvest. Monarch made wine year round. Outside the Manischewitz factory, a 22,500-pound capacity Jack Frost truck would dump waterfalls of sugar into a chute that emptied straight into a large pool of wine in the middle of the factory floor. “An engine, its insides of gears and belts and wheels revealed, worked creakily away, poised over the center, stirring the sugar into the wine,” wrote Commentary magazine in 1954, making “a deep purple whirlpool.”

Meyer was Jewish in that peculiarly midcentury North American way, as the shtetl assimilated into suburbia. He kept a kosher home, sent his children to yeshiva school, and was president of the synagogue. Yet when he traveled into Manhattan, his favorite foods were lobster and Chinese—most unkosher. Producing the country’s leading kosher wine as good as anointed him a community leader, and he served on the boards of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the local United Jewish Appeal, and the United Synagogues of America. “Bad for business,” Leo would mutter, when Meyer proposed unkosher food too publicly.

The rules of kashrut, codified by desert-dwellers thousands of years prior, could be tough on commercial winemakers. Only Sabbath-observant Jews could touch the wine from the time the grapes were crushed until the bottles were sealed with a cork—though there was an out. Mevushal, or cooked, wine is boiled, rendering it immune to the polluting fingers of gentiles. The grapes could not be processed on the Jewish Sabbath or the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—though these usually fall smack in the middle of the harvest.

There was always some question about just how kosher Manischewitz was. More orthodox producers refused to allow non-Jews to even look at the wine—their gaze could pollute it. Monarch, however, made no secret of hiring gentiles. The company followed obvious proscriptions—no work on the Sabbath, oversight by a rabbi. But Gale Robinson, Meyer’s daughter, says that by the late 1960s and ’70s, “the rabbis would say anything was kosher.” For years the rabbis didn’t even show up, said her husband, Marshall Goldberg, who worked for the company. His first task when he began was to fire the rabbis—a task everyone else had avoided—so the company could hire others who actually did their job.

Seeking to expand beyond the traditional ultrasweet Concord, Meyer and Leo converted a winery in Fowler, California, to kosher in order to produce muscatel, sherry, and port from grapes such as Carignanes, Palominos, Fresno Beauties, Feher Szagos, and Zinfandels. It turned out to be logistically challenging to make kosher wine at a distance from communities of Jews. An army of yeshiva students was brought in from hours away in Los Angeles to make the wine, and rabbis had to be flown in from Brooklyn to supervise.

Meyer didn’t mind the inconvenience. He was a man who expected good things to happen. On the phone, he would ask, “Hi! How’s everything? Great?” If his interlocutor demurred, he’d say, “Well, it’ll get better. It’ll get better!” He was so confident of his dominion that he would instruct his children, “If you ever have a problem—if somebody’s following you or you get lost or you need money—go to a liquor store. Just tell them who you are.”

Meyer and Leo were wine moguls of a different era. They decided early on that they had seen too many people in the liquor business become alcoholics, and so they rarely drank—except, of course, for Friday night kiddush over the Manischewitz. When his kids were little, Meyer would let them have Manischewitz diluted with seltzer. By the time Gale, the eldest, was offered the real thing at about age fifteen, she would comment, “Ugh! It’s so sweet! Can’t we ever serve something decent?” The even-keeled Meyer would respond, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!” and Roslyn would shoot her daughter a dirty look. Meyer would tour the great wineries of Italy and France and come home with little to say about the wine itself—instead he would be brimming with stories about the winemaking technology or the layout of the tasting room.