This will be my final post about my most recent trip to France – but buckle up – it’s going to cover over 60 wines! Before I even get started, I have to thank my partner in crime, David Raccah of the Kosher Wine Musings blog. He does all of the logistics work for these trips – working out with the various producers when we can visit, making the hotel arrangements, and arranging for all of the various wines we taste at the hotel. [For that last piece he relies on Ari Cohen of Bakus Wine who is awesome and helps with receiving a good chunk of these wines for us prior to our arrival in France – Thanks Ari!] To say that I couldn’t do this trip without David is an understatement. And even if I could – wouldn’t want to! Honestly hanging out with David for a week in France is really one of the highlights for me each year. Each year we do it a little differently, and each year is an experience! But, no matter how we do it – it’s always super fun – and educational!

Anyhow, this year we omitted all travel, and we split each day between visiting a producer somewhere in Paris and tasting wines back in the hotel room. We usually do this in some sort of suite at a hotel located in central Paris. We need a large room just for the logistics of each of us having sleeping space, storing the insane number of boxes and bottles that come to us while we are there [If you include all of the wine that we tasted and that David and I brought back to our respective homes, it was well over 100 bottles that made their way to that hotel room], and having space to actually sit and taste through 10-15 bottles in a round. 

This year, we decided to taste just about everything in the hotel, blind. This sets up some logistical issues. First we needed to make sure that the wines made sense to taste together – it is unfair to taste a small 2021 wine that goes for 8 Euro right after a 100 Euro bottle. The quality is not going to be the same nor is your expectation. And so, to deal with that, as David was aware of the wines we would be tasting (he arranged for them to be there after all), he broke the wines into a number of flights and bagged them in brown paper bags. I then randomly grabbed and numbered them. So – in short, I knew nothing about which wines we were tasting at all – and while David knew which wines we were tasting overall, he had no control over the order and could not know specifically which bottle was being tasted at a given time.

Another issue we faced was wines being affected by either being too closed – or by a lighter bodied wine or a wine made in a more delicate style coming after a more full bodied or robust wine. To offset these issues, we tasted all of the wines that could be affected by being closed, a second (or even 3rd or 4th time) after time had passed. In addition, on subsequent tastings, the drinking order of the wines was reversed so that wines could not be influenced by the same wine that was drunk previously on a subsequent tasting. Are these methods foolproof in terms of guaranteeing a “pure” result? No. But honestly, we gave each wine a fair shake and did our best to ensure that each wines showed as best it could.

Having said all of that, this does show the inherent flaws of tasting fully blind without the proper facility to retaste with the mitigations described above. The order is something that people can understand clearly but there WERE some crazy improvements for certain wines in subsequent tastings related to air – especially in the wines that were made by Pierre Miodownick. Some of those wines showed far poorer in the initial tasting than they did later on – and many of them needed multiple rounds to come in to their own – even the white! I tasted the Carillon D’Angelus over three days total – and quite frankly it was still improving when I had to dump what I had left before getting on the plane back to Israel. This is something that I have known for quite some time and as a result, even though I participate in a number of blind tastings a month usually with tasting groups that I belong to, but because these tastings do NOT lend themselves to the mitigations mentioned above (due to time/logistics constraints) , I never publish those notes. 

But luckily, here we were able to do it right and so below you will find notes on all of the wines we tasted in the order that we initially tasted them.

Before I get to that though, I have to describe the scene. As I mentioned, we are in a large suite – there are boxes of wine in every corner. There is a small table where we have 10-15 bottles that David has bagged and I have numbered. We have wine glasses out, computers and phones out.  No one is listening to us and so we freely discuss the lines as we take notes. I have to say, in terms of wine tasting experiences, there are NONE more fun than these. Even the ‘80’s pop-rock that David insists on listening to as we taste add to the fun. It is just the absolute best time in terms of tastings. So my thanks to David for doing this with me each year. Super-fun! [Links to his posts about these tastings are here and here.]

Here we go…..