I have been doing these France trips with my friend David Raccah of Kosher Wine Musings for five years now. Until now, David has always come twice a year – in May and November – while I only joined for the November trip. This was mostly due to work scheduling issues, family commitments, etc., and I have to say, often times I missed out by not being there for the May trip. As I always do this with David, I felt that it would be a bit unfair to both the producers and to David to press for wines that he had already tasted and published notes on. In November though, that changed as I asked IDS to provide a few wines that I had missed out on tasting, and it turned in to one of the most epic tastings we had ever had in terms of scores, as it included the 2019 SHL and the 2020 Domaine de Chevalier wines, as well as a number of others that did really well. From that moment, I knew that I really couldn’t afford to keep missing out. It is near impossible to get most of the wines that we taste in France, and that meant I was simply not getting a full picture. So this year I joined in May as well and I was not disappointed. In the hotel we tasted 60+, at IDS seventeen and at Royal twenty-seven wines. Now at Royal, twenty-seven is a not a HUGE tasting.  We have done way more than that previously, but don’t forget, November we did thirty-six, and this coming November there are ANOTHER sixty or so Royal wines to taste! So this May tasting is an absolute necessity – just to keep up!

It is also clear by the numbers of wines being produced that we are absolutely in the golden age of kosher wine production. Almost any major appellation can be found kosher – and anything that isn’t, can be made kosher. For that we have to thank, among others, Mr. Menachem Israelievitch. Simply put, the man is on a mission to deliver high quality wines at all price points from as many varied appellations as possible. There is no other person who has singlehandedly influenced the current wine market more than Menachem. When Royal Europe’s original chief winemaker Pierre Miodownick moved to Israel, Menachem didn’t just step in, he has grown this business tremendously. That’s not to say Pierre doesn’t deserve his props, he’s the man that started it all and proved to the high-end châteaus that this model can work. But Menachem has steadily built on that strong base to get to where we are today. All of us who appreciate kosher wine owe him and the rest of the team at Royal a huge debt of gratitude.

As I mentioned above, this was a modest tasting by Royal’s standards with twenty-seven wines in total – but of those, only three were red. So that leaves  twenty-four whites and rosés and out of that, outside of the two low end rosés which scored OK, all of the whites relatively impressed – and all were from sought after appellations, some well-known in kosher circles like Pouilly-Fumé, Sancerre, and some less well known like Coteaux du Giennois and Touraine – and even some well-known, but hard to find kosher like a CdP white and a dry Vouvray!. Again, all of this is thanks to Menachem, who really has done an outstanding job.

A couple of other things: I usually start off my posts with comments about the current vintages and how they might show. Ultimately, we tasted VERY few ’23 reds – so it’s too early to really get a good read on the vintage – but I’ll speak more about this and maybe give more of a read on the ’22 vintage when we discuss the “Hotel Tastings.”

One other note, David and I do these tastings together, but rate the wines separately. Our palates differ. Having said that, I doubt that two people have drunk more wine together than David and I have. When I taste a wine, I know if David will like it – I also know what score he will give it and vice versa. To a degree IMHO our palates have synchronized a bit over the years though we clearly each have our preferences and our own scales. In addition, at these tastings we are tasting the same wines, from the same bottles, in the same order, under identical settings. As such, it is no surprise then that we often are in sync to some extent. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. With the “hotel wines” at least we give the wines multiple chances to show best, while with the Royal and IDS tastings, these are snapshot tastings –you can save a wine for a couple of hours to see it develops and even ask for a couple of bottles that you think might show differently here and there. Obviously at those tastings we take a “what you see is what you get” approach. Would this or that wine show better with more air or in two days? Maybe, but those are not the options that we are presented. We do the best we can with what is available to us in each circumstance. And I think I can say that we are both grateful that we have the opportunity to taste through these vintages as thoroughly as we do. There is no one else out there doing this much “work” tasting through all of this wine outside of perhaps my friend Yossi Horwitz, who is the only other writer I know flying around the world to taste. For us, it’s weeks of time and a ton of money.  Doing it together makes it enjoyable. We pay for it ourselves – our own flights, our own hotels, and in many cases, we pay for the wines – though the big producers like Royal and IDS are gracious and do give us a significant amount of time by setting up dedicated tasting sessions and providing the wines, while the other major producer, Taieb, sends us the samples to the hotel for tastings. Most of the smaller producers sell us the wines that we then review. We do not get paid by the producers or get remunerated by them in any way. So this has been a labor of love for us both. And for my part at least, I do hope that the reader finds these reviews useful. If at times my style of writing (especially on the “hotel wines” post) comes out a bit more flippant, it is no way meant to disparage the efforts made to produce a given wine. Having said that, after the 65th ’21 Bordeaux tinny wine that tastes of candied Jalapeno, you really have to struggle to write something different and keep the reader engaged. So excuse me, but it’s just the nature of the business.

In any event, enough of my ramblings, on to the wines: