Eat the City(83)

At a time when business owners paid off disc jockeys to mention their products (“I just had the best glass of Manischewitz wine!”), Meyer was friendly with Barry Gray, the brash, abrasive father of talk radio on WMIE, and William B. Williams, the silver-voiced host on WNEW who opened his show, “Hello, world!” He joined the Friars Club and joked with Borscht Belt comedians. Meyer would host off-the-record dinners at the winery—no women, no reporters—and invite the entire Dodgers team for a big Italian meal cooked by the head of Monarch’s trucking division, accompanied, of course, by Manischewitz.

In the years immediately after Prohibition, Leo and Meyer had advertised that their wine was “like Mother used to make”—presumably from Concord grapes in some tenement basement. At that stage, advertising was simple. “Lifshitz wine! Lifshitz wine! Oy, how good,” went one guileless Yiddish-language radio ad. “It’s known by the greatest rabbis as the most kosher wine for Passover.”

But by the 1950s, American taste was changing; a bottle of wine had become an attainable touch of class, and people were drinking more of it. Jews were assimilating, and their products were entering the mainstream: Hebrew National hot dogs, Levy’s rye bread, the rise of the bagel. Monarch wanted to tap in to the broader audience, so a new ad agency worked to fix Manischewitz’s most basic problem on the national market: its name. People didn’t know how to pronounce it—they would stumble and call it Manny, or even construct familiar-sounding words like “Mani-chevrolet.”

“We concentrated on dinning the name into the heads of people,” said the company’s ad man, Charles E. Patrick. “We dropped almost all the visual advertising and took thousands of radio spot announcements all over the country just repeating over and over, ‘Man, oh Manischewitz, what a wine.’ ” The next task was to override the American view of wine as a snobbish drink governed by difficult rules.

“You don’t have to be a wine expert to enjoy it,” read the text for one radio ad. “You don’t have to worry whether to serve it before meals or after meals or when you entertain. For MANISHEVITZ WINE is perfect all the time.”

“We want to bring drinking wine,” Patrick said, “to the level of Coca-Cola.”

Celebrities such as Lionel Hampton, the jazz musician, shilled for Manischewitz in black publications such as Ebony and the Amsterdam News in a special effort to reach African Americans, who had been early adopters.

The ad blitz worked, and soon in Los Angeles Manischewitz was competing neck and neck with the major California brand Gallo for the highest wine sales overall. In an advertiser’s dream, while walking on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission, the astronaut Eugene Cernan exclaimed in astonishment, “Man, oh Manischewitz.” His comment was broadcast and rebroadcast back on Earth, and Meyer Robinson delighted in playing the recording for visitors to his office. “Isn’t that amazing, on the moon!” Meyer would say, rising in excitement from his chair.

But trouble was brewing. The business partners had a falling out when Leo got divorced and moved to Florida with his new wife. The two principals barely spoke. Meyer would refuse to take a raise because then Leo would get one too. Instead, they survived on company credit cards, each trying to outdo the other in amounts charged, Meyer’s son-in-law recalled.

At some point, as Americans became savvier about wine, Manischewitz became the butt of the joke. It was ridiculously sweet. Even the name somehow was funny. “Manishevevevitz,” a man stuttered repeatedly on The Jack Benny Program. On St. Patrick’s eve, Bob Hope introduced a quartet, all with Irish names, and announced that their sponsor was Manischewitz—hilarious. A record was released with the track “The Mambo-Shevitz,” in which the refrain was “Man, oh man.” Even the wine’s spokesman began to look comical. Sammy Davis Jr. had been contracted to represent the company in the 1970s, but he was less and less the family entertainer one would wish to advertise one’s kosher-for-Passover product, as he spent his time filling his Rolls-Royce with sex kittens and his schnoz with cocaine, as one journalist put it. Finally, the Manischewitz lawyers learned that the porn star Linda Lovelace had described in her memoir engaging Sammy in a foursome. Sammy Davis Jr. was soon out of a wine contract.

Monarch beat out Seagram’s to import Tsingtao beer after Leo and Meyer managed to put aside their hostilities and travel all together with their families to China. Monarch imported the Italian beer Raffo and a Swedish beer called Kalback. A low-calorie wine, Manischewitz Light, debuted and was quickly dropped. The company also released Cream Anasetta, Cream Almonetta, and the best-selling Pi?a Coconetta, a pi?a colada–flavored wine cocktail that may have lacked a certain sacramental gravitas but sold 350,000 cases the year it was introduced. More than 85 percent of Manischewitz consumers were not Jewish—and 60 percent were black. Manischewitz was the number one imported wine in Puerto Rico, and also sold in Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Belgium, and the Virgin Islands.

But poor management plagued the company. In 1984, a meeting was held with the sons-in-law on one side of the table, the bankers on the other, and Meyer Robinson and Leo Star at either end. The bankers said, “You got six months to straighten this business out,” son-in-law Marshall Goldberg recalled.

Soon after, Meyer and Leo and the sons-in-law decided to sell the Manischewitz brand for $20 million to the Canandaigua Wine Company, one of the country’s largest wine manufacturers, which moved production to the Finger Lakes area. When the Brooklyn plant was closing down, Sal Meglio came over from Red Hook and bought a hundred cases of Manischewitz wine for five dollars a case, to sell for ten. Sal remembers a half-empty warehouse and people making off like thieves with as many boxes of wine as they could fit into their cars. The end of Manischewitz was the last gasp for local winemaking: other commercial wineries closed in quick succession, and there followed a nearly wineless period in New York City.