After NY, I flew to France for 4 days of wine and really, nothing else. I didn’t have a chance to visit the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or anything else for that matter. If I wasn’t travelling (to or from wine) or eating (with wine) then I was sleeping (passed out from drinking wine). Why did I not have time to do ANYTHING else? Well, I didn’t take this trip with my wife or family. Had I done so, the itinerary would have been vastly different – and I would have been lucky to have visited anything wine related at all. But really the reason that this trip was able to be so jam packed can be summed up in two words – David Raccah.

Way back in February at KFWE-LA, after lamenting that the current wine excursion was coming to an end, Menachem Israelievitch, Royal Wine’s chief winemaker in France suggested that I come out with David on his next trip to France. Well, that sounded great to me – and after some crazy planning and taking off way more time from work than I should have, I made this happen. What I didn’t understand – even from reading about David’s various hectic trips to France — was just how insane these jaunts are from a logistical sense. We wanted to hit Paris to taste through all of Royal’s upcoming releases (easy as we were both landing at De Gaulle – though David was landing four hours later) and go to Alsace/Strasbourg to taste through all of the Koenig releases – most of which are unavailable outside of France. AND while there to meet up with Nathan Grandjean of Yavine to taste his new Vin de Vienne releases as well as taste through a number of other hard to get wines. Finally, Roanne which is where Taieb is based. Roanne, depending on train schedules, is a good 4-5 hours away from either Strasbourg or Paris – and always via Lyon. That meant that traveling to and from Roanne could not happen on the same day. So we decided to break that up and spend the third night in Lyon. So my trip went like this:

There is no way I could have made heads or tails out of something that complicated by myself. Coming with David really made it an incredible experience.

More on all of that in various upcoming posts. This post will just deal with Day 1. After meeting up with Menachem for lunch, we proceeded to the apartment where he had set up for the tasting – which I will describe in detail in a second. After the marathon (6 hour) tasting, we had dinner at one of the best French kosher restaurants L’Atelier Deli where we met up with a surprise guest – Pierre Miodownik who happened to be in Paris visiting and who joined us for dinner. Dinner was excellent (you need to get both the charcuterie platter and the Foie Gras plate if you go – out of this world) and capped off a great day.

But back to the tasting. Menachem had the wines laid out in in the order we would be tasting. I rarely get to experience wines so professionally presented. It certainly adds to the experience. In a nutshell, on the White front there are some excellent 2018’s coming out soon – including a first ever kosher Premier Cru Chablis from Côte de Jouan (unfortunately the sample that Menachem asked to be sent over was prepared incorrectly and was not drinkable – David stayed for the weekend after I left and was able to taste – see his complete notes here). With the  Reds, even with the challenging year that 2017 was in Bordeaux (frost meant that some vineyards had low/no yield), Menachem and Royal managed to produce some really nice bottles. Having said that, frost issues aside, 2017 in Bordeaux was not 2016 or even 2015. From what I could taste, it was somewhere between 2014 and 2015. Now 2014 was VERY good – and that’s what you have, some very good wines of the 2017 vintage. My fear is that that from a pricing point, we are not going to return to 2014 prices – but time will tell.

As a reminder – as opposed to my friend David who has the capacity to give pinpoint ratings even when tasting through 30 bottles at a time, I refrain from doing so, as I don’t trust myself to be 100% accurate unless I can spend some quality time with the bottle in question – as the wine changes, especially when young or not ready. [Even then, I do not use the 100 point scale but rather my own 5 point system which takes into account things like cost. Etc. – you can find that here]. So below are my impressions of each of the wines we tasted – without any formal scores: