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.

“Getting hooked on wine led me to much bigger things” he avers. “In retrospect it seems extraordinary that a beverage was able to give me both a career and a calling.”

Wine for the Tribe

Jeff and his beaming wife Jodie are in their element as they chat with quaffing customers. The couple are not only winemakers, but collaborators on cookbooks. Of the seven cookbooks bearing Jeff’s name, Jodie has been his premier tester on most of the recipes and the coauthor of The Working Parents Cookbook: More Than 200 Recipes for Great Family Meals.

Standing next to the Covenant table, it’s instructive to overhear the comments. “So buttery,” a taster remarks as he samples the cabernet sauvignon. “Very smooth and supple,” comments another as he tastes the Red C. Moshe Fink, the owner of Chateau de Vin in Cedarhurst, confides, “I keep my own private stock of this wine in my cellar for special family occasions.”

Given such enthusiastic reviews, I undertake to drink on the job (oh, the sacrifices a writer must make). The sauvignon blanc is light and fresh, while the chardonnay is like no chardonnay I’ve ever tasted before. While I’m not generally given to enological jargon, I’d venture to say it has a suggestion of grapefruit mixed with other complexities my untrained palate isn’t equipped to identify. The $100-a-bottle Covenant is surprisingly soft and has grassy undertones. As wine guru Robert Parker wrote in a review, it’s “velvety and supple rather than astringent,” demonstrating “Morgan’s nice touch with tannin.”

The religious wine-buying public has taken note. Jeff is proud — and still amazed — that so many religious people are making Kiddush on his wine. A couple of years ago, he recounts, he was in Manhattan one Friday on business, but had been invited for Shabbos to the Monsey home of Nathan Herzog, his distributor and friend, whose family produces Herzog wines in California.

“How am I supposed to get to you before Shabbos?” he asked.

Nathan replied promptly: “You take the Monsey bus on 47th Street. Just be sure to get there before three.”

“I had no idea how I was going to find this ‘Shabbos bus’ among all the city traffic,” Jeff recalls. “But I went down there, wearing my usual jeans and a leather jacket and a baseball cap that says ‘Covenant.’ When I spotted a group of about 30 chassidim waiting around, I figured this must be it. I asked a guy at the front, ‘Is this the bus to Monsey?’ ”

“Well, he looked at me, and his eyes grew wide. He said, ‘Are you from the covenant?’

“I thought, Oh, no, maybe he thinks I’m making fun of him. But then he repeated, ‘No, I mean, are you the guy from Covenant wine?’ When I said yes, that’s me, he starting waving his arms in the air and yelling, ‘Hey, everyone! It’s the guy from Covenant wine!’ It turned out that maybe 50 to 75 percent of the people there had some Covenant in their cellars.”

Jeff says he prizes the time he spends with frum people. “They embrace me and energize me,” he told Mishpacha. “When I’m with them, I feel part of the tribe.”

Brave New Wine World

“If you’d told me when I was 15 that one day I’d be making wine and that all these chassidim would be my friends, I would’ve laughed or said you were crazy,” Jeff says. Raised in Long Island, his youth followed a trajectory similar to other nonaffiliated Jewish kids of his generation, right down to the tinseled evergreen in the house on December 25th.

As a young man, Jeff enrolled at Wesleyan University to study geology and music, leaving for France at age 19 to pursue classical flute, then jazz saxophone at a conservatory in Nice. He certainly developed as a musician, but what really left its mark was the markedly different French lifestyle.

In much the same fashion that Julia Child first understood the possibilities of food in 1948, eating her first French lunch of sole meuniere in Rouen, Jeff’s first modest, government-subsidized lunch in the university refectory was a revelation. For five francs, or the equivalent of about 50 cents, he was treated to a display of salads — celery rémoulade, greens in vinaigrette — and, since it was Friday in a Catholic country, not just fish but a whole fish laid out on a plate, followed by a cheese course. “I’d grown up on fish sticks,” Jeff says. “I’d never seen a whole fish. I wasn’t even sure how to eat it.”

Then he heard himself being asked, “Monsieur— rouge ou blanc?” After a moment, he realized they were referring to wine, which he could receive for an additional 25 cents. “At that point, I didn’t know if I was going to learn to play music,” Jeff grins, “but I definitely knew I’d learn how to eat and drink.”

Jeff spent five years in the conservatory, and then remained in France working as a musician. By age 34, he was leading a band in a casino in Monte Carlo. But despite the glitz, which he describes as “big band, big hair, dancers,” he found himself feeling disenchanted. It wasn’t making him happy anymore; he wasn’t doing anything creative. “I asked myself, ‘What am I missing? What do I love besides music?’ ”

He began considering wine as an alternate career (“ignorance is bliss,” he chuckles). He proceeded to spend some time in France working in vineyards, but knew he’d never be able to find a job in wine in France — he was a “know-nothing American” in a land of wine snobs.

He returned to America, where he began knocking on doors of small wineries in Long Island. Eventually, he founds jobs in wine cellars and continued to take music gigs at night. It was during this time that he met and married his wife Jodie (“the first Jewish girl I ever dated — Hashem was looking out for me”). They had their first child while living out on the eastern end of Long Island and he began writing pieces for a local newspaper, which segued into freelance assignments for the New York Times.

Write into the Business

The next link in the chain of Hashgachah pratis leading from wine to Judaism came about when Jeff’s articles caught the attention of an editor at the prestigious wine magazine Wine Spectator. When the editor gave him a call in January 1993 to ask if he could write a story, Jeff was thrilled. Then they told him the topic: kosher for Passover wines.

“What are you talking about?” Jeff protested. “I don’t know anything about kosher. I wasn’t even bar mitzvahed!”

That editor — who is today the managing editor of the entire publication — said he didn’t care, as long as Jeff was Jewish. “Last year a non-Jew wrote the column,” he said, “and we were accused of being anti-Semitic.”

So Jeff bravely soldiered on: He contacted the Herzog Wine Group, and was put in touch with Nathan Herzog. It would be the first of many contacts with a man who would become his dear friend and mentor in kosher wine. Herzog referred him to kosher wine guru Jay Buchsbaum, and off they went to Levana, a high-end kosher restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, to sample the designated bottles. Despite the gourmet food, Jeff could barely taste a morsel: “I was so nervous, and too busy taking notes,” he recalls.

Despite the “hardships” of wining and dining at Levana, Jeff was able to produce a five-page feature. It was more than a success; it opened the door to steady work for the Wine Spectator. “Imagine,” he comments, “my big break into wine writing was through kosher.”

He would work for the Wine Spectator for almost eight years, producing seven annual kosher-for-Passover wine features in addition to weekly reviews and other stories. (He also contributed, over the years, to Food and Wine, Wine Enthusiast, Elle, and the Wall Street Journal, for which he still pens columns.) In 1995, Jeff was offered the position of West Coast editor for the publication, and moved with his family to San Francisco.

By the turn of the millennium, however, after more than 500 articles and demanding editorial work, he felt he’d reached the end of the line. “I felt divorced from the wine-making process,” he says. His path back in came through a job with Leslie Rudd, a Jewish businessman from Wichita who owns the New York foodie landmark Dean & DeLuca. Rudd owned vineyards of his own, and hired Jeff to produce the Dean & DeLuca cookbook and direct his winemaking operations (none of which are kosher). The two Jewish wine aficionados had the inspiration, about a year later, to put together an informal Jewish winemakers’ club. “I knew the scene, I knew all the producers,” Jeff says. “And I knew the process of making kosher wine is the same process as making nonkosher wine. We set up a tasting and invited a few winemakers in.”

In attendance was Eli Ben Zaken of Castel Wines, produced in the Judean hills. “I already knew he was one of the better Jewish winemakers,” Jeff says. “So he came and poured his wine. Leslie had never tasted a really good kosher wine. He took a sip, and I don’t know which one of us said it first, but we both thought, ‘Hey — we could make a great kosher wine, using Leslie’s grapes!’”

Jeff, inspired by the possibilities, declared his ambition to make the best kosher wine in 5,000 years. Rudd replied, “If you mess it up, it’ll be the worst kosher wine in 5,000 years!” But despite this left-handed vote of confidence, the two of them agreed to invest together and began looking for a vineyard. They searched and argued for about a year, finally finding, during the 2003 harvest, a well-known vineyard willing to sell them ten tons of grapes.

Kosher Wining

While otherwise Jewishly unschooled, Jeff knew that if his wine was going to be kosher, he’d need a mashgiach and a partner. He turned again to his first acquaintance in the Jewish wine business, Nathan Herzog. As nervous and eager as a prospective chassan about to propose to his kallah, Jeff flew to Manhattan and invited him to dinner at Prime Grill to propose his idea over a bottle of (mevushal) wine.

Wine is deeply lodged in Jeff Morgan’s core, but it’s somehow inextricably intertwined with his Jewish neshamah — a fact which became manifestly obvious in his own gut-and-soul-level reaction to what should otherwise have been a simple business negotiation. “I was really nervous,” Jeff confesses. “We got past the sushi, we were getting to the main course, and finally I came out with it. I said to Nathan, ‘I want to make the best kosher wine in 5,000 years.’ And then — I don’t know what happened — I just broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably.”

Nathan Herzog, a thoughtful and compassionate person, waited patiently while Jeff pulled himself together. Then he asked, “How would you like to do this?”

Jeff explained that he hoped to send his grapes via refrigerated trucks to the Herzog winery in Oxnard, California, close to 400 miles away. “I knew they had a good cellar crew,” he says.

Herzog, both businessman and mentsch, was happy to help a friend but also able to spot a good opportunity: “You can use our winery, but let me be your distributor in the New York-New Jersey area,” he countered, and the shidduch was finalized.

“Without the Herzogs, I couldn’t have done it,” Jeff says gratefully.

Jeff chose the name Covenant — a suggestion from a friend — to convey the sense in which wine creates sacred bonds with family, friends, the land, and Hashem. Fortunately, Leslie Rudd’s fears of making the worst kosher wine in 5,000 years were never realized. On the contrary, the first Covenant vintage, while small, was a roaring critical success: Wine guru Robert Parker declared the 2003 cabernet “one of the finest kosher wines on the planet,” and it received scores of 90 to 94 in Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate. Since that time, Jeff says he’s just gotten at his craft, tweaking the process and expanding his repertoire.

“Jeff is a perfectionist — he’s very meticulous,” Nathan Herzog explained to Mishpacha. “He produces small quantities, and he does nothing by machine.” (For some of his vintages, Jeff doesn’t even press the grapes; he simply lets them sit until they begin to melt and ferment by themselves.)

Rabbi Elchonon Tenenbaum, the Morgans’ local Chabad shaliach, similarly describes Jeff as a person who selflessly aims to honor Hashem by making the greatest kosher wine possible. “That’s why he only makes non-mevushal wine,” he says. “He’s looking not only for the top taste quality but for the top spiritual quality; he wants to honor every hiddur. The wine in the Beis HaMikdash, after all, wasn’t mevushal.” Rabbi Tenenbaum believes it’s Jeff’s purity of kavanah that’s responsible for Covenant’s success, reminiscent of Sara Imeinu’s bread remaining fresh an entire week from the influence of her kedushah.

Through Jeff’s personal and professional connection to the Herzog family — he’s in touch with Nathan, Yosef, and Mordy several times a week, and calls them his “extended family” — Jeff enjoyed his first Shabbosim. “I definitely feel the fire, when I’m in Boro Park or Jerusalem,” he says.

The Herzogs, for their part, have done their best to gently midwife Jeff’s spiritual path. “Our father taught us, ‘We’re not just in the business of making Kiddush yayin. We’re in the business of making Kiddush Hashem,” Nathan Herzog says. “Wherever I go, I’m always on the lookout for lost Jews. The wine distribution business is dominated by Jews, but unfortunately, most of them are not religious. I make it a point to call four or five people every week just to wish them a good Shabbos.”

It was Nathan who asked Jeff what his Jewish name was (the answer: “I think … maybe Yaakov?”) and insisted he give Jewish names to his two daughters one Shabbos morning in shul.

A friend from a traditional Moroccan family taught Jeff how to say Kiddush; consequently, he still chants Kiddush with a Moroccan nusach and inflections. He and Jodie kashered their home kitchen, put up mezuzahs and, five years ago, Jeff made himself the bar mitzvah he never had. “You know which parshah we realized is mine?” he says, with a wide, incredulous smile. “Noach!”

A couple of years later he started putting on tefillin (“it doesn’t take 45 minutes anymore; I can now do it in five,” he says), and he davens daily. And while almost all of the cookbooks he’s produced were based around well-known nonkosher restaurants or establishments, his next cookbook, slated for release in 2014, will focus on kosher food.

Feeling the Land The Morgans’ Jewish evolution was substantially aided seven years ago by the arrival of a Lubavitch couple setting up the Napa Valley Chabad Jewish Center, about 20 miles from the Morgans’ home. Rabbi Tenenbaum has become a spiritual link for Jeff; in turn, Jeff has made a wine aficionado out of Rabbi Tenenbaum.

“He came out here a city boy from Crown Heights,” Jeff says, amused. “When I had him pick a fig from our tree, he said he’d never picked anything before in his life.”

(Rabbi Tenenbaum himself admitted to Mishpacha by phone, “It changed my understanding of wine completely, from just a bottle you pull off the shelf in a store to an entire process lasting at least two years from vine to consumer.”)

Jeff helped Rabbi Tenenbaum try his hand at the winemaker’s art, and after “two great vintages,” the two decided to collaborate on a special wine to sell in Crown Heights, entitled Cuvee Chabad, whose proceeds benefit the Chabad House. Rabbi Tenenbaum helps out a bit at the vineyard in exchange, and designed the label. (“I make him sing for his supper,” Jeff jokes.)

Their relationship has a certain symbiosis; while Rabbi Tenenbaum has raised Jeff’s familiarity with Jewish practice and spent time learning with him, Jeff has enriched Tenenbaum’s once-theoretical Torah knowledge about wine and agriculture. “I used to read in the Gemara about the harvest season, about how the leftovers from the vineyards would be put on top of the succahs as s’chach, and how Succos occurred during harvest time,” Rabbi Tenenbaum says. “But it has a whole new meaning for me now that I live among the vineyards and see that Succos falls out right in the middle of the crushing season.”

Jeff himself has admitted to the challenges of observing Succos properly right in the middle of his busy season, when Yom Tov interrupts the busy schedule. He commented to a reporter for Wines and Vines, “Some years, it’s not too bad. But last harvest, the winery was essentially closed down for four out of seven days during each of the three weeks we brought in fruit. Can you imagine what it’s like to close the door on your fermenting Napa Valley Cabernet for four days without checking on it? That, in itself, is a leap of faith.”

While Jeff’s aware that growing Jewishly would be easier within a community — Covenant’s mashgiach, Jonathan Hadju, commutes the 40 miles from Oakland every day — he feels he wouldn’t be able to make the same quality of wine if he wasn’t living on-site. “You have to live among the vines to make the wine,” he says. “You have to honor that sense of place.” He describes his home in Napa as “one massive vineyard, like Bordeaux in France.”

“I don’t know that I’ll ever be a major talmid chacham,” Jeff says. “But I do have something I can share with the Jewish world. My goal for now is to stay connected to Judaism and make the best kosher wines I can.

Grape Expectations

While many of us grew up on the “sacramental” wines made from Concord grapes, Jeff Morgan asserts that these grapes, native to America, are absolutely not suited for wine. “All they’re suited for is raccoons,” he says derisively. “Okay, maybe it’s fine for grape juice. But it’s not a grape that was ever used for wine in Israel or Europe.”

He says it was a quirk of history and geography that made the ancient Jews into superb winemakers. “The secret to good wine is good grapes, and those depend on the climate and soil,” says the former geology major. “Eretz Yisrael happens to be good for wine; the soil around Jerusalem, for example, contains a lot of limestone, which is what makes for good chardonnay or pinot noir grapes.” Unfortunately, the expulsion of Jews from Eretz Yisrael left them with, as Jeff puts it, “a serious enological challenge.” However, he believes that the type of wine he manufactures — naturally cultivated, hand-produced, oak-barrel-aged — is much closer to the wines used in the Beis HaMikdash than the sorts of kosher wines he grew up with.

Surprisingly, Jeff says that grapes were not native to France, the country that would one day set the standard for winemaking. “In the time of the Romans, the French were not cultivating vineyards,” he explains. “And it was probably the Jews who taught the Greeks and Romans how to make wine.” While the Muslim Ottomans pulled up many of the grapevines that had flourished in the Holy Land, the Crusaders brought back cuttings to France. Some have suggested that the term “chardonnay” comes from the Hebrew, “shaar adon-ay.”

Jeff still marvels at the power of wine. “It has such a special significance; it has its own holiness,” he says. “It represents the essence of living, of Jewish life, in a spirited way. Beer and Scotch don’t inspire a deeper covenant. For me, wine does something nothing else does. It inspires, it cements my connection to Jewish life.”

“Wine is a sacred beverage,” he says. “My mission — my calling — is to restore its epicurean quality to a level that befits its exalted spiritual status.”