After Koenig, we headed back to Strasbourg for a quick dinner and then to Nathan Grandjeans’s house for what was to be a mega-tasting of about 30 wines. David had pre-picked about 25 of them for Nathan to arrange, and as I mentioned – just for fun we had stopped at a local kosher grocery where we picked up about another half dozen bottles. The method that I like to use when I taste wines in order to fully score them is to sit with a given bottle for a period of up to 24 hours to see how the wine develops and give it the opportunity to show itself in the absolute best light. When doing a large-scale tasting, the best I can do is get an impression of a wine and then move to the next. David who is a good 10 years ahead of where I am in terms of experience can accurately score a wine just based on the 1-2 minutes he spends. So for David’s ratings and his impressions of this leg of the trip, please see here. Perhaps I’m being too hard on myself (or too easy on the wines as the case may be here, for some of them were absolutely horrible) and should just score. But for now, I’ll stick to the way I’ve been doing things. In this case though, while I didn’t get 24 hours with any of these bottles, we did come back to re-taste the entire lineup a second time in the morning before leaving Lyon – so that made me happy as it is closer to what I like to do.

After we finished re-tasting the wines, we also tasted a few rums that Nathan had at home, which were all excellent (I’ll include notes for them as well), and then had to run to get the train to Lyon. Why Lyon? Because it is the closest major city to Roanne where Taeib’s office is and where we had to be the next morning at 8:30. There is no way to get to a Roanne by train from another major city without going to Lyon. But even Lyon was a 4+ hour trip from Strasbourg. So this meant that we would be staying in Lyon overnight and leaving at about 6 am to get to Roanne.

When we got off the train, we decided to hit up a local wine store for a few bottles to taste through that night (because we hadn’t tasted enough wine) and to have with dinner. We met up with Arie Elkaim of MesVinsCacher – who opened up for us even though the store was undergoing renovations and the wine was all in the warehouse – and we chose four bottles for the evening. He also came through and drove us to a local restaurant for a relaxed dinner. The food was solid, and we were able to just sit back relax, eat, and drink with nothing formal to do that night.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel that David had found us in Lyon. Until now we had stayed in standard hotels, which were more than adequate for what we needed. In Lyon, there apparently was some sort of conference going on and there was not a room to be found at a major hotel in close proximity to the train station we needed to be at 6 am. And so this is how it came to be that David booked us in the absolute weirdest hotel I have ever been in. Let me be clear – this place was NOT a dump. We’ve all been in crappy hotels at some point. This wasn’t that. It was just absolutely bizarre. It’s also really hard to describe – it was just surreal. First off, we couldn’t find it. It seemed to be on a deserted street. The Uber driver dropped us off and ran. We found that it was behind a driveway gate – and was not a hotel at all but a somehow a cross between a bed and breakfast and a hotel. OK, I know none of that sounds weird – and I’m not going to do this justice so I will just leave here a few pictures of the artwork that adorned the walls to basically represent what the place was like. Let’s just say that the proprietor absolutely fit in with the décor. Think of a French version of John Waters but in his late 70’s and not as tall – carrying around a white pocket dog of some sort. OK – enough.

We tasted through our four bottles, and those are included here as well, and tried our best to sleep in this freakshow of a room. (For David’s notes on this leg, see here.) We hustled out of there before 6 and headed for the train station where a wonderful day at Taeib awaited.

One note – what was striking to me throughout the tasting in Strasbourg and at Taieb was the disparity between price and quality from some producers – The easy target is of course the Pape Clement. To be clear – those wines aren’t bad. But, when asked to pay $200 a bottle, one would expect something that is mind-blowing – and you don’t get anything more than a nice wine. On the other hand, there are some absolute gems that you can find in France that never make it out of the local market for some reason – and these are excellently priced. This will become even more apparent in my next post about Taieb, who is producing really nice wines that are absolutely affordable.  But even here at this tasting, Nathan provided some excellent stuff – specifically, the Peyrat wines and the Marsac provide excellent value – and are sadly unavailable out of France. While the Magrez wines – with the Pape leading the pack — are CRAZILY overpriced and of course are exported. Another lesson – just because you have name recognition – and a decent score, does not mean that a wine is worth it. If you are just looking at scores and you see a 92 you might say to yourself – “Hey, a 92 is a really good score; this is awesome. And a Pape Clement – wow that’s a prestigious bottle”. But, as a consumer you REALLY need to factor in price relative to that score. Is a 92 ever going to be worth $200? NO. In order for it to be worth that money (which is more than almost any other kosher wine has been on release), you would have to be seeing universal 95 and above scores with drinking windows predicting that this wine is going to go 20 years and provide some excellent development and enjoyment down the road. Needless to say, that’s not the case here – nor is it with any of the Magrez wines from the 2015 or 2016 vintages. So buyer beware. Taste before you buy, or find someone you trust who has tasted and go with their recommendations. If you are reading a review and you are not sure if the wine is “worth” it, don’t be afraid to ask the person writing the review what they think about the wine’s value. I am usually pretty blunt about these kind of things – but NONE of the reputable people currently writing about kosher wine would steer anyone wrong and would happily tell you what you need to know if the review didn’t make it clear, myself included. In any event here are my notes on the wines: