Identity in a Glass: From Lwów to Mt. Airy
As we approach the holidays and reflect on this past vintage, we find ourselves celebrating an extraordinary milestone—becoming Maryland’s first Kosher winery. On November 2nd, more than 200 people from across the state joined our family for a landmark event in which we publicly dedicated our winery as a Jewish-owned business. With the guidance of Rabbi Jordan Hersh of Beth Sholom, we affixed a mezuzah to every door and doorway at our winery during our Chanukat HaYekev, and we released our first Kosher wine produced under a conservative hechsher—our 2025 Barbera Nouveau. We are deeply grateful to have welcomed so many familiar and new faces, along with industry, state, and local officials, for this historic moment.
Reaching this point was no small feat. Becoming Maryland’s first Kosher winery required determination, patience, and unwavering commitment. Yet our goal has always remained the same: to craft wines of the highest quality while honoring our family’s unique and deeply rooted history.
When we first envisioned hosting a Chanukat HaYekev at the winery, I began to feel the profound significance of what we were undertaking—launching the first Kosher Maryland wine and dedicating our winery as a Jewish business. It was, and still is, overwhelming in the most meaningful way. In moments like these, I think of my grandfather.
He and my grandmother, Lois Loew, built this winery to fulfill a dream—one that allowed my grandfather, William Loew, to reconnect to his family’s longstanding legacy of producing Kosher mead in Poland. Forty-three years ago, they established this winery together with the help of their three daughters: Jen, Amy, and Karen.
For us, a mezuzah on a door shows that we are proud of our identity, of who we are. We are a Jewish owned winery that has an incredible legacy—in fact one of the longest legacies of mead making in the world. Having a source of identity is important, it plays a vital role in how you live, work, and create a legacy to leave for future generations.
The Löw family history of producing mead commercially began in 1870 in Poland. Over time, the businesses expanded to over five different prominent meaderies that produced Kosher mead.
My grandfather was always proud of his identity—to be Jewish and to have come from a beautiful and grand family who owned prosperous mead making businesses. For those of you who do not know, our co-founder, William Loew was a Holocaust survivor who was born in Lwów, Poland. During the Holocaust, Jews were targeted by the German Nazis, Soviets, and collaborators with the goal of exterminating the existence of Jewish life.
For my grandfather identity was heightened during the first two years of World War II because the family businesses and the people he loved the most were ripped away from him. When my grandfather was able to escape Poland and into Hungary, he assumed a false identity with fake papers showing he wasn’t Jewish. Over the course of the seven months my grandfather lived in Budapest and worked for the underground resistance, he did so with a false identity. My grandfather had to maintain that false identity when he was arrested by the Hungarian Gendarmes when testing the borders between Hungary and Romania and then handed over to the German Nazis. Hiding who he was, was imperative in order for my grandfather to survive.
While my grandfather was in imprisoned by the German Nazis in the Budapest Political Prison, he still maintained his false identity. He was interrogated and beaten every single day for three weeks until he was transported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. When he arrived at Auschwitz, my grandfather was stripped of all identities and tattooed with the numbers 193229. My grandfather had to endure five months of that hell in Auschwitz.
In January 1945, my grandfather was transported along with thousands of other prisoners in open cattle cars for close to 22 days to Flossenbürg Concentration Camp and eventually a death march from which he was rescued by the 99th division of the US third army. After over two years of not being allowed proclaim who he was, Wolf Löw and Jewish, my grandfather was liberated. My grandfather was always proud to be Jewish despite his past.
So, our identity is important to us and we are honored to be able to share it.
We can imagine that each of the Löw family businesses in Poland had a mezuzah on each door and doorway as did each of the doors to their homes. On November 2nd, we secured a mezuzah on each doorway with pride and reconnecting our winery to our roots. Each of our mezuzot are special and beautifully handcrafted by my cousin, Ellie. They each represent our family and our history.
This is the first time a Loew family business has displayed a mezuzah on their doors since 1940. Proving, that in the end, the German Nazis and their collaborators did not succeed. Without the support of the county, the state, our wine community (which includes our customers) and Jewish community, we wouldn’t be able to have a platform that so proudly shares our identity on a daily basis.
Our first Kosher wine is Barbera Nouveau and it is called a vin de premier, or the first wine released from the most recent vintage. For context, we processed the Barbera starting on September 14th and we bottled it on October 29th, which happens to be my grandfather’s birthday. This wine is made with 100% Barbera grapes that were destemmed and sorted by hand. Truly, it embodies what I would call a love of labor. This wine is produced in a different fermentation method than commonly implemented to produce red wines and also has seen no oak aging. We only produced 126 cases, and it is now available for you to purchase and enjoy at your holiday dinner table (and beyond).
