OXNARD, California (JTA) — On Friday nights, in Jewish homes around the world, a familiar ritual unfolds: a blessing over wine, poured into a cup and passed around the table.

That ritual, multiplied during Passover, may help explain why kosher wine is holding steady even as the broader wine industry struggles.

Across the United States and globally, wine consumption is declining. Baby boomers, long the industry’s most reliable customers, are aging out of peak drinking years. Younger consumers are drinking less alcohol overall and are more likely to reach for craft beer, spirits or ready-to-drink cocktails when they do. In California, wineries have begun laying off workers, cutting production and, in some cases, shutting down altogether.

But in the kosher wine market, the downturn looks more like a slowdown.

Royal Wine, the largest distributor of kosher wine in the United States, is used to seeing year-over-year growth in the double digits, according to Jay Buchsbaum, a vice president at the New Jersey-based company.

“By that standard, we did not have a great year,” he said in an interview. “But we did have an increase, whereas the industry has declined by as much as 12%, so we’re bucking the trend.”

At Herzog Wine Cellars in Oxnard, California, that resilience is apparent on the production floor.

In the weeks before Passover, the busiest season of the year for kosher wine, a forklift is moving pallets across the warehouse, and bottling lines are running steadily as workers prepare shipments destined for holiday tables.

“Passover for us is what October, November and December are for the rest of the industry,” said Herzog’s winemaker David Galzignato, describing a seasonal surge that mirrors the year-end rush in most wineries.

Herzog is the flagship American winery of Royal Wine, which is owned by the Herzog family, an Orthodox family originally from Slovakia that has been in the business for nine generations and today dominates the kosher wine market in the United States. The scale is unusual for kosher production: Bottles range from $13 table wines to $300 Napa Valley releases, sourced from top vineyards across California.

Galzignato, an Italian Catholic who joined the winery in 2021, was brought in with a specific mandate: to elevate the quality of kosher wine.

“They wanted me to take kosher wine quality… to the same level, or better, than the non-kosher quality,” he said.

But despite overseeing every step of production, Galzignato cannot physically move the wine he makes.

Under kosher law, from the moment grape juice is released until the wine is bottled, only Shabbat-observant Jews may handle it — a requirement that shapes everything from staffing to workflow.

“It just takes a little bit more planning,” he said.

Even with........

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