South American winemakers aim at kosher consumers up north

lujan de cuyo, argentina | Guarding the entrance to Bodegas Barberis, a family-owned winery in western Argentina, is a small ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary, known locally as the Virgen de la Carrodilla.

"She's our local patron saint and protector of the vineyards," said Adrian Barberis, who with his three brothers owns the prosperous winery.

The statue hardly would cause an eyebrow to be raised in this devoutly Catholic country — except for the fact that Bodegas Barberis, 15 miles south of the city of Mendoza, is a leading Argentine exporter of kosher wine.

Each year, the church-going Barberis family turns over 20 percent of its winery to a team of Chassidic Jews from Buenos Aires. For several months before Passover, the Chassidim supervise every aspect of wine production — from fermentation to bottle-sealing — to ensure that the laws of kashrut are observed to the letter.

By now, the winery's 15 employees are used to seeing the half-dozen bearded men running around checking cooling tanks, tasting samples from wine vats and operating forklifts on the loading docks.

That's not all. Honoring a Jewish tradition known as terumot vena'aserot, Barberis must intentionally spill on the ground or give to charity 10 percent of its annual kosher wine production. Other talmudic laws prohibit Barberis from using fruit produced during the first three years of a grape harvest, require all wine to be flash-pasteurized before bottling and demand that the land be allowed to rest every seventh year.

"We are allowed to cultivate the grapes and bring them to the bodega in plastic bins," Barberis said. "We leave them in the truck, and the rabbis and their employees unload them and do the whole process in a special sector of the bodega. The only thing our oenologist does is explain to the rabbis and their people how to use specific machinery."

Barberis said his biggest market is the United States, where an estimated one-fifth of Jews regularly drink kosher wine, mainly at weddings, circumcisions, bar mitzvahs and funerals, and at their Shabbat tables.

The peak season for kosher wine is right before Passover, when hundreds of thousands of American Jewish families stock up.

"It all depends on production schedules," said Barberis, who is familiar with basic kashrut terminology. "The Orthodox Jews don't work on Pesach, so if Pesach coincides with fermentation and the grapes are mature, we can't use our grapes, meaning we have to buy grapes from other wineries."

This year, Barberis expects to sell $300,000 worth of kosher wine to Royal Wine Corp., an importer based in Bayonne, N.J.

Other wineries in both Argentina and Chile — a six-hour drive over the Andes Mountains from Mendoza —are also turning to the relatively small but lucrative kosher market to supplement exports in the face of weak internal demand.

That's resulted in the appearance on U.S. supermarket shelves of relatively inexpensive brands such as Chile's Layla Cabernet Sauvignon and Argentina's Byblos Bonarda, both imported by Abarbanel Wine Co. of Cedarhurst, N.Y., as well as Chile's Alfasi Merlot, imported by Royal Wine Corp.

"Currently, Argentina is exporting more than 50 percent of its total production. Some bodegas export up to 90 percent," says Enrique Chrabolowsky, a Jewish wine critic based in Mendoza.

"Argentina never paid attention to exports, because almost all of its production went for the internal market," said Barberis. "Then internal consumption began declining, which obligated us to export our products. We started later than Chile, which never had a big internal market and has been exporting since the beginning. But Argentina can grow rapidly and has big potential."