The Jewish Link is proud of our small but mighty cadre of seasonal publications, and we’re grateful to present the 2024 Wine Guide as an insert in this week’s publication. The fourth annual Jewish Link Wine Guide is our flagship magazine, an 80-page glossy that is the only independent magazine featuring kosher wines in America. We create this magazine with an eye to be helpful for our readers’ Pesach wine purchasing, and we create our Summer Food & Drink and Fall Food & Drink magazines seasonally as well, coordinated with the holidays of Shavuot and Sukkot, respectively.

This year, we also used this pre-Pesach time to remind our readers that a Jewish community dealing with a war in Israel and with quite a bit of Jew hate on the home front means that it is even more important this year to support Israeli brands; not just of wine but of all types of products.

One thing that you may notice is different in the guide this year is that, in deference to our Israeli wine community in crisis, we did not award “Wineries of the Year” or “Innovator” awards, as is our custom. We strongly hoped to encourage our Israeli winemakers to continue to produce and reach customers in Chutz La’Aretz, and we did not want the war combined with the previous year’s pause in production due to shemitah to disadvantage them in any way. Instead, we thanked the winemakers who made special efforts to bring their wines to us in the U.S. this year; and are sharing stories of their efforts in the magazine as well as the newspaper. We hope you will find all of our features about the various struggles, achievements and initiatives of the kosher wine community in 2023 and 2024 interesting and engaging.

Even with the challenges of the past year, this tasting season we had 560+ bottles as entries in our ranked tastings, and many new types of wine and varietals added to our lists. We also added bubbly wine rankings this year in a big way. We continue to be proud of our blind tasting process in which every wine is covered and labeled before being presented to our judges.

We extend our thanks to our dedicated judging panel volunteers: Yossie Horwitz, Jeff Katz, Greg Raykher, Daphna Roth, Yeruchum Rosenberg and Gary Wartels.

And as always, we hope you enjoy our magazine and that you find it useful as part of your annual Pesach planning. Chag Kasher V’Sameaach.