During my trip to Taieb last year, the topic of wines making their way to Israel came up. Only three of the wines that I tasted on that trip – the Joseph Mellot Sancere, the Chateau Castelbruck, and Chateau La Naud. Of those, the Mellot and Castelbruck are still on back (and inferior) vintages here, with the Mellot being the ‘16 here (with the ‘18 out in France) and Castelbruck is the ‘13 here (with the ‘16 current in France). If the current vintages make their way here, I’ll be stocking up. The remaining wine – the La Naude – is on the same vintage, but it’s not a very good wine.

In all, there are about seventeen Taieb wines that make their way to Israel. Of the fourteen remaining, the list includes four rosés, a few lower end table wines and two low end champagnes. Of the more interesting wines that remain, I was able to find three bottles – two vintages of Chateau Rigaud (current 2016 plus the 2015) and the current vintage of the La Colonne. Even those aren’t easy to find. The importer seems to only sell to French owned small wine shops. Of these, some have questionable storage, others have very spotty selection. The storage issue is one to be careful of as I had gotten a La Colonne previously, but the bottle was obviously heat damaged – and the wine was way off. Luckily, I gave it another chance from a different store. The 2016 Rigaud that I reviewed here also may have had a storage issue, the cork looked to have absorbed wine up to the top – but without any cork imperfections – which could have indicated poor storage. But it did not seem to negatively impact the wine. So be careful where you get these wines from here in Israel.

One thing uniform about all of these stores, besides being of French ownership and primary clientele, is the pricing. It’s odd and seems to have little to no relation to the pricing in France. The La Naude goes for about 9 Euro in France, the Rigaud for 14 and the La Colonne at 22 – and they all seem to be priced in 100 shekel range here, by all of the stores. Not sure what the rational is – and quite honestly some of these wines do not have a shelf life. So importing them and keeping them at high prices where they will just sit on the shelves dying doesn’t seem to the smartest strategy. Hopefully this is just a matter of the importer learning the wines and the market and it will adjust in the future.

In any event, I found the three wines and have been waiting to taste them for a while, perhaps with some friends from the neighborhood, but the opportunity just never came up. So I decided to bring them to work yesterday and have them with my friend and co-worker Moshe, who also appreciates wine. We ordered a late lunch in and got to work. Here are the notes: