#Bartenura now available in a 375ml bottle!

Naturally rich in perfumes, Bartenura #Moscato is geared towards preserving these aromas in the finished wine. Only the best grapes are used, and fermentation takes place at a low temperature in order to craft a wine with fresh, peachy perfumes and light, grapey fruit. Ideal on its own, as an aperitif, or with fruit or light deserts. Serve chilled and drink young.

The kosher wine industry’s slow shift from sweet, syrupy kiddush wine to dry, serious, table wine was first initiated back in the late 1970s. In the intervening decades, kosher wine producers and importers have been busily arguing down the stereotype that kosher wine is sweet, proving the opposite time and again by offering dry wines of high quality produced all over the globe. Within the last decade they seemed to have succeeded.

Yet the single most successful #kosherwine, commercially speaking, is the sweet and simple, albeit enjoyable, Bartenura Moscato. What’s more, the brand behind this success was first introduced specifically to shift away from sweet wine.

Moscato is a semi-sweet, lightly fizzy, typically simple, and usually low-alcohol wine, made from Muscat Blanc grapes, most famously from the Piedmont region in northwest Italy, though Muscat is cultivated around the globe. Perhaps the most successful brand of Moscato on the market, kosher or not, is the Bartenura Moscato, packaged in its distinctive blue bottle.

“When we thought the market was ready for dry kosher wines, back in the late 1970s,” recalls Nathan Herzog, of the Royal Wine Corp, the world’s largest producer, importer, and distributor of kosher wines, “we went first to Italy, and then later to France.”

The idea was to have dry kosher wines that were on par with the popular non-kosher dry table wines of that period. So, Italy’s famously food-friendly wines were a natural starting point. “Our first dry kosher imports,” says Herzog, “were the 1978 Bartenura Valpolicella and the Bartenura Soave.”

The brand was named for Rabbi Ovadiah ben Avraham of Bertinoro, a 15th-century Italian rabbi best known for his popular commentary on the Mishnah, commonly referred to simply as “The Bartenura.” It is an easy name to recall, familiar to its target audience, and carries positive, particularly Jewish, associations.

Royal’s Bartenura brand sold well, and other wines were added to the lineup—one of them being a Moscato d’Asti. In the 1990s Royal had the idea of changing the packaging from a green-tinted bottle to the now internationally recognized, and much copied, royal blue bottle.

As is by now well-known, the blue bottle developed a strong following not only in the Jewish market, but also in the African American community. It soon also became a known favorite of several famous hip-hop and rap artists.

Royal seized the opportunity to promote the wine, and as a result, Bartenura’s blue bottle Moscato became the best-selling Italian Moscato in the world. Exact figures are not public, but according to Herzog, sales of Bartenura’s Moscato are heading towards a half million cases annually.

Even outside of the iconic cobalt blue bottle, Bartenura has become a mainstream brand, and an international one—exported to 32 countries, including France, Israel, Spain, Russia, China, and throughout South America.

As the Bartenura brand has been growing over the last four decades, the main winery that has been supplying the wines for many of these years, Gruppo Araldica, has grown in tandem. “The volume of kosher wines is now so large,” notes Herzog, “that a part of their greatly expanded and updated winery, Araldica Vini Piemontesi in Castel Boglione, in the province of Asti, Piedmont, has been sectioned off as kosher year-round.”

Bartenura, Moscato d’Asti, Italy, 2016 ($15-though often on sale for less; mevushal): This is a semi-sweet, slightly fizzy, low-alcohol tropical fruit and citrus flavored wine. Not complex or ever meant to be anything but fun and light, it is a terrific aperitif, matching well with cheese and other simple fare as well as brunch and many desserts. In the summer, or when one wishes to conjure sensations of summer lounging, it can be consumed the way many Italians drink it—like a soda, in a tumbler over ice.