Manischewitz
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Manischewitz is a leading brand of kosher products based in the United States, best-known for their wine and matzo.
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[edit] History
The B. Manischewitz Company, LLC was founded by Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz in 1888 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Company built a second factory in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1932, to better serve the large Jewish community of the New York metropolitan area, and the Cincinnati store was eventually closed. The B. Manischewitz Company eventually became R.A.B. Food Group LLC. R.A.B. Food today markets kosher foods under several brands, including Manischewitz. R.A.B. is not involved with Manischewitz wine, however, except in name: it has since 1986 licensed the Manischewitz brand name to the Manischewitz Wine Company.
[edit] Foods
In addition to matzo, Manischewitz-labeled foods include cookies, pasta, and soups. Other well-known kosher brands associated with R.A.B. include Carmel, Elite, Rokeach, Mrs. Adler's, and Tradition; many of these were acquired by R.A.B. after successful runs as independent kosher labels. Kosher foods such as these are staples of many supermarkets in the United States. As is the case with many kosher foodstuffs, the variety of products offered by Manischewitz is very convenient to Jewish families that keep kosher, but also to less observant and non-Jewish people. The latter include consumers who want traditional Jewish food on their tables, or who believe that foods marked kosher are healthier or have been prepared with greater care than non-kosher items.
[edit] Wine
The Manischewitz winery is located in Naples, New York, and has since 1987 been the property of Constellation Brands, which continues to license the Manischewitz name from R.A.B. Foods.
The Manischewitz winery is best known for its sweet concord wine, which is widely available in much of North America. Made from labrusca grapes, its aroma is unusual, and is combined with a large amount of residual sugar. As concord was popularized over the years by U.S. media as being the kosher wine, it is often the wine used by non-Orthodox Jews in celebrating Passover. However, Manischewitz's sweet Concord contains fructose, a sweetener derived from corn, which is a food forbidden for Passover (see Kitniyot for details on why corn is forbidden). Manischewitz produces special Kosher for Passover bottlings of their wine which are sweetened with cane sugar as opposed to the corn syrup used throughout the year.
The sweetness of Manischewitz wine and other kosher wines is often the fodder of jokes. However, Kosher wine does not have to be sweet. One of the reasons for the prevalence of sweet kosher wine in the U.S., and in the Americas generally, dates back to the early days of Jews in America, when there was the need to locally produce kosher wine for the Kiddush ritual on the Shabbat and holidays. The combination of a limited choice of grape varieties that could grow in the areas where Jews had settled, along with limited time available to produce the wine, yielded a bitter wine that had to be sweetened to make it palatable.
Indeed, so well-known is the sweet Manischewitz variety in the U.S. that the existence of a thriving kosher wine industry anchored by vineyards in France and Israel, along with a growing U.S. industry, is often a surprise to Americans unaccustomed to taking kosher wine seriously.
