Wine Creates Connection

For hundreds of years, wine has been a catalyst for people to meet, connect, and bond. 

For me, wine has always been a source of history, connection, and purpose. When I meet other producers and taste their wines or meads, there is a connection and understanding of who they are (and in some cases where they come from) and the message they are trying to convey to those who taste their wines. Wine is a very personal product, as is mead.

Over the past two months, I’ve learned a lot through connections and experiences in wine and mead. I traveled to Poland at the end of April for a mead competition. With each visit to Poland, I have learned more about my family’s history over the last several centuries and have met unique people who have confirmed my family’s mission to discover and preserve my grandfather’s history. It is because of these connections and extensive research that I can confidently proclaim that my family’s mead production is the last living link to a destroyed commercial mead tradition that existed among Jewish owned businesses in Poland before the Holocaust. 

Last week, I was in Napa and Sonoma, which is the central focus of the well known California wine industry. Unlike the East coast, vineyards in Napa and Sonoma dominate the landscape, primarily focusing on just a handful of grape varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay (although we do produce two of the three varieties I listed). We feel lucky to be producing wine on the east coast. Because Maryland is in an “emerging” wine region, our identity as a winery is through our history, and through our ability to produce quality wines from other noble grape varieties. 

As much as I had a wonderful time in California wine country, especially in connecting with friends and producers, I feel grateful for the relationships we have developed through our small winery in Maryland. We have been able to achieve an incredibly unique connection with all of our customers through our history and our wines that I have not experienced anywhere else. We have developed an environment where we have the opportunity to share our history, especially my grandfather’s story of survival of the Holocaust, through sharing our wines with our customers. This, in turn, has created a phenomenon of story telling and sharing of personal history amongst our customers. Some, have learned of their own family’s histories during the Holocaust and WWII for the first time while sitting at our tables and sipping our wines. We feel privileged to be part of that discovery of history.

It’s clear that there is something complex and beautiful that unravels when a bottle of wine or mead is opened and enjoyed. Perhaps, your personal memories of learning about your family history include a bottle of wine shared with loved ones, like mine.