I think the funny thing about falling in love with wine is that you can spend all this time learning about vineyards and producers and vintages and farming and all the things that make a bottle great, but before any of that, wine usually means something much simpler.
For me, it was just on the table.
And if I’m being honest, the first wine I ever had was almost definitely Manischewitz. Not because I was thinking about wine in any serious way, and certainly not because I had any idea that one day I would care about wine the way I do now, but because that was the wine that was there. It was there on Shabbat, it was there on Passover, it was there at the holidays, it was there in the moments where family and tradition and memory all kind of blended together without anyone needing to explain it.
At the time, I don’t think I really understood that as wine. It was just part of being Jewish. It was part of the blessing. It was part of the table. It was something familiar and sweet and maybe a little bit funny in the way that everyone has their own relationship with it, but it was also one of the first ways I understood that wine could mean more than what was in the glass.
As I got older, wine started to become a real passion for me, and a lot of that happened through experiences that, on the surface, did not seem connected to Jewish wine at all.
In the Navy, I started to understand how much a bottle could change the feeling of a room. There were meals and conversations and moments with people from completely different backgrounds, and wine had this way of giving people a reason to slow down and talk. It made the table feel more open. It gave people a way to share where they were from, what they cared about, what they missed, what they loved. I think that was probably one of the first times I really started to understand wine as something cultural and human, not just something you drink.
Then later, at the Culinary Institute of America, that love became much deeper and much more serious. I started learning about wine in a way that made me appreciate how much intention sits behind every bottle. The farming, the vintage, the place, the people making it, the choices that are made in the vineyard and the cellar, all of those things started to matter to me. I fell in love with the idea that wine could be this honest expression of a place and a moment in time, and that when it is made thoughtfully, it can carry a story in a way very few things can.
But the more I fell in love with wine, the more I kept feeling this gap.
I would be in these conversations about great bottles, great vineyards, great meals, great winemaking, and there was always this part of me that wished I had a kosher wine I was truly excited to bring into that conversation. Not a wine I had to defend. Not a wine I had to introduce with some kind of caveat. Not something where I had to say, “No, trust me, this one is actually good for kosher wine.”
I wanted something I could pour with pride.
I wanted a wine that could be part of the same conversation as every other serious bottle I loved, but that also carried the part of me that is Jewish and that comes from this long tradition of gathering around a table, blessing wine, marking time, and making ordinary meals feel sacred.
That is really where R. Degen comes from.
It comes from this feeling that I wanted to bring two parts of my life together that had always felt connected to me, but did not always feel connected in the wine world. My love of wine and my Jewish heritage were never separate in my own life. They both lived at the table. They both had to do with family, memory, conversation, place, and the people you want beside you when you open something meaningful.
So R. Degen is not different because we are trying to make kosher wine as some kind of technical category. It is different because, for me, the whole point is personal. I wanted to make a kosher wine that I would be proud to serve to the people I love most. I wanted to make something that could be opened at a Seder or on Shabbat, but also at a dinner with friends, or with someone who may not know anything about Jewish wine, and still feel like it belonged there.
I wanted it to feel thoughtful. I wanted it to feel honest. I wanted it to feel like it had a reason to exist.
Because so much of my love of wine is tied to the idea of sharing. Sharing a bottle, sharing a meal, sharing a story, sharing some part of yourself that people may not have known before. And for me, being able to share my heritage through a great bottle of wine feels incredibly meaningful.
R. Degen is my attempt to do that.
It is a wine made from a love of place and craft, but also from a love of tradition and the people who shaped me. It is about taking kosher wine seriously, not as a compromise and not as an afterthought, but as something that can be beautiful, expressive, and worthy of the table.
And more than anything, it is about being able to pour a glass and feel proud of everything it represents.
