If you read my last post, you can guess that we wanted to waste no time getting out of that nutty hotel in Lyon. So we woke up at 5:30 and made our way to the train station by foot. The trip from Lyon to Roanne is just over 2 hours. With no coffee, I was suffering. When we got to Roanne, Yoni Taieb was waiting for us at the train station and drove us over to the Taieb offices. First coffee, then pray, then taste.

A few words about Taieb wines. The Taiebs hail from Algeria. The company was founded by Moise in the ’60’s. They began producing kosher wines upon their settling in France after the Algerian revolution. In the 1970’s, Moise’s son George (now the elder statesman of the company) joined his father, and they took over the distillery which produces the world renowned Anis Phenix, which is an Anisette, one of the family of Anise based liquors. The primary difference between Anisette and Arak is that Arak is dry while Anisette contains sugar. Truth is I had no idea that it was the same company. I have known about Phenix Anisette for a long time. My wife’s father is from Algeria where Phenix and the Taiebs originated, and we keep a bottle of Anistete (usually Phenix) in the house in case we have to entertain the family (I am not a fan of anisette – and I have tried…) Currently George’s son Yoni runs much of the day to day operations at Taieb, and it was he who spent the morning with us as the elder Mr. Taieb was called away due to a tragic death in the family.

Taieb produces a crazy number of wines. We tasted 27 wines on that day. These were wines that either David had preselected from their catalog or that Yoni felt would be interesting. It is just a small sample of currently available wines from their production. Their wines are found across France in supermarkets, liquor stores, and on the web. They are huge. Unfortunately, outside of France they are virtually unknown! American distribution and the complex web of how that works does not interest me. In Israel the distributor is called Yud Daled Asakim (י.ד. עסקים). They import a limited number of the Taieb wines. Unfortunately I didn’t know all of that going into this, or I would have asked if we could taste through all of the wines available in Israel – or at least the interesting ones. They import a total of 17 including two Champagnes. In the end, we tasted three– two nice (Joseph Mellot Sancerre and Chateau Castelbruck) and one not (Chateau La Naude). I will try to look for others and write up what I can in a separate post. I also want to take a look at pricing. I am hoping things aren’t horribly inflated. The problem is, even though these wines are being brought in now in an organized fashion, the distribution remains narrow. It basically ends up in stores that have French ownership (at least as far as I can tell). That’s a pity as that is a very select few indeed. But I will save that for another post.

This tasting was primarily divided into regions (after the whites) – and that is how my notes are divided.