Time for my posts on my annual trip to France with my friend David Raccah of kosherwinemusings.com. Like last time, we spent the entirety of this trip in Paris rather than visiting any specific wine-making area. The real benefit here is in our ability to taste a larger number of wines in the hotel, so we get a lot more covered that way. While that’s nice – and its important to taste as much as we can, my vote is to integrate at least one “away” day per trip,  so that we visit a few wineries in a specific region as part of the trip  – just to mix it up a little. In all honesty, I have now been to France a number of times, and I have basically seen the inside of a single winery in Alsace and NO standard tourist attractions. That’s right – I have never been to the Arche de triumph, the Eifel Tower or the Louvre, and I have spent 90% of my time in Paris!!! But that’s how dedicated we have been to tasting as much as possible. And quite honestly, this trip we hit an all-time high of 85 bottles tasted in the hotel over three days. But more on that later on.

While this trip lasted only three days, we accomplished a lot and I have two major takeaways:

1. While not reflected in the two 2021 wines tasted below, 2021 was in general a horrible vintage for red wines in France. This is shown in all of the smaller wines that we tasted. Almost all of them tasted green, tinny, and thin. For kosher, Burgundies had an extra problem over their non-kosher counterparts (which themselves were impacted by the frost and all of the other climate issues) in that the harvest took place over the chagim this year – which made it extra challenging for mashgichim to be present at crucial times to process the grapes. Now none of the big Bordeaux wines have been released yet, of course – that will come next year – but things don’t bode well (though I am told that many of Royal’s bigger wines did well during en premier tasting in non-kosher – so who knows.
2. With the Bordeaux big boys, 2020 is the most accessible vintage we have seen in a long time. Now – that’s not universal (I’m looking at you Carillon d’Angelus!), but it’s a pretty fair generalization.

Anyhow – these are topics that will come up over the course of the next few posts, so keep them in mind. Now onto the specifics of the trip.

I landed on a Monday morning and after davening, a quick shower, and a cup of coffee, we headed out to Bokobsa, our first stop of the trip. Crazy, but while I have obviously tasted tons of Bokobsa wines over the years, I have never visited them in person until this trip. Great folks there  – from the owners, Clarisse and Lionel Bokobsa, down to the salespeople who helped us at this tasting, Benjamin Kukurudz and Patricia Uzan, and their Mashgiach, Mendy Asseraf, who also joined us for part of the tasting. Really sweet people who are knowledgeable about their product and the market overall. As much as there is a complex ecosystem in the US spirits market in general and the kosher market in particular, in France, in some aspects, it’s even more complex. There are competing kashrut organizations, which require separate labeling, depending on whose hechsher shows on the label (something that in Israel and the US is unheard of – you can have as many hechsherim as you want on the same label), as well as a complex relationship between various producers and distributors – of which Bokobsa is both – and which markets to various constituencies, which require the separate hechsherim. In any event, the folks there manage everything with grace and class, which is no small feat and not to be taken for granted. They also make some really great wines to boot. The problem is, from what I can tell, some of the best of them will probably only be distributed locally in France – but again, that’s part of the complexity of the aforementioned market. Before I start, just an FYI, both David and I post our notes independently and he is slightly ahead of me in posting. I will link to his notes when they are available before mine – I think people sometimes find it interesting to read them side by side.

Here we go: