Really, the high point of my visit to France each year, besides hanging out with my friend David Raccah for a week tasting wine and eating good food, is getting to spend quality time with Menachem Israelievitch, head winemaker for Royal Europe. It’s not just that he’s a consummate professional, managing dozens of productions at wineries throughout France. It’s not that a huge number of those wines each year invariably end up at the top of heap in terms of best wines released during the year. It’s really not about the wine at all. It’s that in spite of all of this, he’s a consummate mensch and all around great guy. It is just an absolute pleasure to spend time with him. He opens up his home each year to David and me, and we usually spend a full day taking over his house drinking through the releases. This year we did about 30! The man is just awesome, and I really do appreciate the time and effort he puts into to making sure these tastings are so excellent.

As I mentioned in my last post, there are a couple of there are a couple of things about the 2020 and 2021 vintages that we learned this trip:

1. 2021 was a very difficult vintage for reds. Again, you don’t really see that in the below wines. Part of the reason is that rather than produce wines in a way that Menachem couldn’t guarantee proper staffing in Burgundy for the harvest, he simply chose to not produce burgs in 2021. Period.
2. The great wines of 2020 are simply the most approachable that I can remember in a quite some time (likely due to the hotter than usual vintage). This is very true for almost all of the Royal releases in this category. That should make some of these wines VERY attractive for higher end alternatives that require less cellaring than usual to enter their drinking windows.

One other thing which is true specifically for Royal – there are some EXCELLENT buys here in the mid-range category – especially as the high-end wines have had price increases across the board. Some of the mid-range scores are through the roof and really provide incredible value. Not to spoil things if you want to read things in order – but if you are looking for THE best value – stop what you are doing and order some of the 2020 Pavillion de Poyferre and 2020 Chateau Montviel – incredible wines (94 and 93 points respectively) at relatively reasonable prices. And that’s the other story, prices have gone up – and this has nothing to do with kosher. Simply put the 2020 vintage was MUCH more expensive than the 2019 vintage. And so, if you are looking for “deals” on the 2020 vintage – these wines are where it’s at. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

Here are the wines we tasted in order: