SA winemaker brings kosher brandy to market

For the first time in South African history, a kosher brandy made entirely on home soil will hit the shelves. From grape to glass, the new spirit not only meets the strict standards of kashrut, but marks a major milestone in South Africa’s growing kosher industry.

Essa Potstill Brandy, aged for three years, was launched on 28 August as the first locally made kosher brandy.

Essa Wine Company, a Cape Town winery owned and run by Josh Rynderman and his wife, Chana, has already established itself as a top-tier producer, getting the highest score out of five kosher wines in a blind taste test by leading wine critic Michael Fridjhon, in a Business Day feature on 5 February 2025.

Rynderman, who has been making wines for more than 10 years, sought to expand the Essa Wine brand to include other spirits, and since brandy is made in a similar process to wine, it seemed like a no-brainer.

“When I came to South Africa in 2018, I wasn’t very impressed with the wine offerings. The longer I’ve stayed, I’ve grown to feel like there’s room to level up, at least for the kosher consumers here. It wasn’t a project that anyone was doing,” said Rynderman.

This is why three years ago, Rynderman started the process of creating a Cape potstill brandy, a type of brandy made using a traditional copper pot still, which is the same method used to produce high-quality spirits like cognac, and that would rival some of the best cognac at a fraction of the price.

“First, you must make the wine, then you’ve got to distil the wine, then make proper decisions for maturation, blending, and the like for three years down the road,” said Rynderman, “South African law requires that any Cape potstill brandy be aged in a barrel, so it’s an investment in time and it’s an exercise in patience, but all of those things kind of go into making a legitimate Cape potstill brandy.”

From the beginning of Essa Wine’s journey, Rynderman made sure that the wines were kosher. The wines that Essa produces are “non-meshuval” wines, meaning that they have to be handled by a mashgiach (kosher supervisor) and only Shabbat-observant Jews. This means that the wines that Essa produces don’t undergo a process known as flash pasteurisation, where they are heated to 85 degrees Celsius, and then cooled down before fermentation.

“For anything grape-based, any liquid that comes out of grapes, whether it’s grape juice, wine, balsamic vinegar, or brandy, from the moment the grapes start to emit a liquid, there has to be Jewish involvement for it to be kosher,” said Rabbi Dovi Goldstein, the managing director of the Kosher Department at the Union of Orthodox Synagogues of South Africa (UOS). “We would require from our perspective at Kosher SA that a certified mashgiach is involved.”

Similarly, Rabbi Yochi Ziegler, who is in charge of shechita (the Jewish ritual method of slaughtering animals and birds for food) and wine production at Kosher SA in Cape Town, said that when it comes to making a kosher wine or brandy, “the mashgiach becomes the wine maker, and no-one else is allowed to do any processes with the wine, grapes, until the later stage. But the initial stages have to be exclusively done by the mashgiach,” he said.

“Although normally a mashgiach will just go to check that everything is done kosher, when it comes to wine, brandy, and all grape juices, they have had to essentially become the wine maker,” said Ziegler.

Rynderman said that in the process of creating a kosher brandy, since brandy is just a distilled wine, Essa follows the same process of creating its wine but distils it.

“We just take all of that work that we’ve done to make a kosher wine, albeit a very low alcohol kosher-for-Passover wine, and we distil the wine and capture the alcohol vapours that come off of the potstill and mature it.”

Rynderman believes the reason why Essa Wine was the first to launch a locally made kosher brandy is that no-one else had the drive to do so.

“Someone’s got to say, I want to make a kosher brandy. Most manufacturers in South Africa, whether it’s food or drink, don’t specifically want to produce a kosher product just for the hell of it. Someone has to want to do it. From a financial aspect, that’s a very important part. There has to be impetus to do it.”

For Rynderman and Essa Wines, the making of a kosher brandy is the first step in creating more kosher spirits like gin and vodka.

“We’ve got an incredible wine industry in our country, and it’s never been fully appreciated or used in the kosher industry,” said Goldstein. “This has been a strategic mission of ours – to get kosher South African wines onto the global stage. Some fantastic wines are now showing up, like Essa Wines, Sydney Back Wines, and others that you can now find in great stores all over the world. There are also some great local spirits that you can find on the shelves. But having a locally made kosher brandy has been a mission of ours, and was the natural next step in trying to find ways to expand this market, which makes sense because it falls under the same laws in the manufacturing process as wine. It’s almost like a natural progression.”

“We’re not going to stop there. We’re going to find other products to make that are kosher for Passover, like vodka, limoncello, and gin. These are all things that the distillery itself has had experience with,” Rynderman said. “We’re going to experiment, and we’ll just have fun with it.”