Just because I haven’t been writing, it certainly doesn’t mean I haven’t been tasting. One of the more prolific episodes occurred near the end of August. A friend who is in the business asked if I would like to come by and blind taste a couple of wines that he was considering bringing into the store. I thought we would taste 3-4 bottles and be in and out in half an hour. That turned into 20 bottles over about 2 hours. I had absolutely no idea going in what the bottles were going to be, who the producers were nor what price range they were in. It was a pure blind tasting. In the end it was split into 4 flights with each flight consisting of a different price range – though again, I knew that only after the fact. All of the wines ended up being Israeli and the producers were both large and small. There were a couple of nice surprises and I inadvertently ended up basically doing a portfolio tasting of Beit El winery without knowing it so that’s one less winery I have to visit any time soon. Out of the 20 wines I tasted, I liked 5-6 of them and was OK with 1 one other – with the rest being passes for me.