As I previously mentioned, a good part of the tasting on this year’s trip to France with my friend David Raccah was done in the hotel and the VAST majority was blind. In fact, there was really only one exception to tasting blind and that was the 2021 Jean-Phillipe Marchand releases produced by Taieb. This was due to the fact that we specifically wanted to maintain a tasting order with many of these wines.

Taieb is really the most experienced of the kosher producers making Burgundies – all of the D’Ardhuy (2010-2015) and Lescure (2014-2017) releases were Taieb. So, they were there doing higher-end Burgundy well before 2020 when Royal started or even IDS in 2018. Taeib started working with JP Marchand in the 2017 vintage, produced again in 2019, and now again in 2021. [Very recently I participated in a tasting over  two nights of many of the recent Burgundy releases from the various producers, including some of the previous JP Marchand releases – and I will hopefully get to that soon after I finish these articles on France.] Now as I have mentioned over and over again – 2021 was NOT an easy vintage for reds in France and for kosher Burgundies in particular, due to the various climate issues and when the harvest in Burgundy fell out in relation to the chagim. Having said that, overall there are no bad wines here. They are all good to excellent. They likely all could have been better if this was a different year, but such is life. Here are the wines in the order in which we tasted them: