Note: I am embarrassed at how late this post is. It was 95% complete by mid-June. I just never got around to finishing and editing due to my work schedule and of course the ongoing situation here, which as I have noted, does not leave me in the headspace for writing. But as I have a whole bunch of posts that I need to catch up on and other trips that are just around the corner – so I decided to get off my butt and get writing. I hope to get a number of posts out in the coming weeks. Again, my apologies. Back to the post (as if it had been written just after the last one.)

Now comes the most fun part of each of these France trips with my friend David Raccah of Kosher Wine Musings – the Hotel tastings. Gear up, this is going to be a long post.

I wish people could somehow get the full experience of the bedlam that is these tastings. Our suite is filled to the brim with wine. New wines get delivered every day, and the concierge can’t keep track of the various deliveries. The place is a wreck. We keep the air conditioning as low as it will go – when it’s working, it’s freezing. When it’s not, its super stuffy. There is no room to move. Fast food containers, laptop chargers, Glasses, makeshift spittoons, open bottles everywhere. The bathrooms where we dispose of the wine and “do the dishes” are a wreck. Quite frankly, I am surprised they let us back each year. And then of course there are the tastings themselves. We land, get to the hotel, get our stuff settled, do inventory – and start tasting. There is no time to waste. We want to taste at least twice, usually three times, and if we can, even four when necessary. You can’t do that unless you are on the ball and getting this process going immediately, so we can have time to let the wines rest and taste them again the next day – and the next – all the while fitting in the organized tastings we do with various producers. We usually are up before 7 and we usually finish tasting after 1am. There is no other way to do it. When people ask why we don’t go around seeing some of the sites in Paris and beyond – this is the reason. No time! It’s also why we stopped going to visit Taieb in person or make visits to Strasbourg/Alsace like we used to. There simply is not enough time to physically get to these places AND taste all we need. Thankfully Yoni Taieb is gracious enough to send samples to the hotel each visit – as if he didn’t, we really WOULD have to go to Lyon, as Taieb is an important producer as IDS or Royal – and in a way, even more important. There are wines that we simply cannot taste outside of France that are Taieb wines, whereas most of the IDS and Royal wines do make their way at least to the US and usually to Israel too. And so Taieb is a MUST. But thankfully Yoni takes care of us each time. Quite honestly, IMHO Taieb reaps a benefit that other IDS and Royal do not in that we give those wines 3-4 days to show their best – whereas with Royal and IDS, they are really just snapshots of what a given wine tastes like then and there. 

So, with all that, there is also the interpersonal aspect of these tastings. As I have mentioned before – I taste hundreds of bottles a year with David. I can give you his score based on my tasting, and he can give you mine. We have impacted each other’s preferences ever so slightly – and overall, we are more or less in synch on the big picture at this point – and that is why this works so well. I can say though that where we are woefully NOT in synch is in music preferences. Music plays a big part of the background when we taste in the hotel – and David has a soft spot for early 80’s pop-rock/soft-rock. Think Peter Cetera, Journey/Steve Perry, Starship (no not Jefferson Airplane, not even Jefferson Starship – just Starship), Foreigner, Heart (no – not “Dreamboat Annie” era Heart like “Baracuda” or “Crazy on You”, etc , think 80’s era Heart like “These Dreams” or “What About Love”). You get the picture. I tend more to the Classic Rock/ Rock/ Alt Rock etc.  – and so, there is a battle that ensues. As to finding songs that are palatable to us both, for instance I can dig “Alone” by Heart, great vocal there. Instead of Peter Cetera, I suggest “25 or 6 to 4” by Chicago with Peter Cetera on vocals. I trim down the Journey playlist etc. But it’s a battle. And I often lose. So by the end of these trips, I am usually whistling Kenny Loggins or Falco or some other trash and I need a week to detox of the early 80’s pop-rock that David so adores. But that’s what makes this all fun. And fun we had.

Back to the wines. As I was saying, it’s a lot of work. Production of kosher wine in Europe is through the roof. It gets harder each year to keep up and do this at the level that we do. There are only so many hours in the day. Also, I tend to go through a number of editing rounds before I have finished notes. Not in the basic descriptors. Those are what they are – but notes for me are stream of consciousness at the beginning. David has this down to a science and basically gets his notes into a near finished format during the tasting. All of that takes TIME. In the future, something is going to have to change. I’ll give you a great example. We had every intent of doing the Hotel tastings blind. IN fact, we have a really great system worked out that tries to cancel out many of the issues one faces when tasting blind. The problem is, it is VERY time consuming. On top of that, it is dependent on a HUGE amount of room as all of the bottles need to be grouped and orders maintained. Sometimes the suite we get, while enough for tasting and for both of us to sleep – really leaves no room for the spread that occurs and is required to logistically make blind tastings a reality. And so, after the first round of tastings this year, it became apparent that it was NOT going to work. The only way we can do this is by getting another space to store all of this wine, lay it out properly, and manage it – and someone to help out – so that we aren’t wasting time getting all of the bottles numbered, covered, etc. This is something we have spoken about – and we will have to see how to deal with this in the future.

In terms of the wines themselves, we can now basically put a pin in the ’21 vintage. Outside of random stragglers that will pop up over the next couple of years – we are done. Outside of a few bright spots from IDS and Royal, ’21 was dismal. ’22 is still an open question. I know, you are thinking to yourself that last November, I was already down on ’22. Yes, I still am. But what has been proven in ’21 is that even with a dismal vintage, good wines can be made. What’s crazy is that we have barely seen any ’22 mid-range wines and no ’22 big wines yet from Bordeaux. And of the few that we did see, it was a mixed bag.  So let’s give the ’22 vintage a chance.  ’23 also is way too early to call – with very few of the little wines being released as of yet. 

We did seem to get a ton of other wines from Italy, Spain, and regions in France other than Bordeaux – from a variety of vintages. Overall, the quality of kosher wine, like in the non-kosher world, has drastically improved over the last decade. There are very few HORRIBLE wines being produced. (I said few, not none!) In fact, I think this hotel tasting was overall super successful. Yeah, maybe there were no superstars – but overall, it was a much more solid lineup than usual. It is really nice to see the kosher options expanding. I usually try to travel very light, but I took two wines with me that I wanted David to taste, which I thought he would like. Both scored well – one from Rioja (I’m a diehard tempranillo fan –and am over the moon when I can try something new) and an Israeli white Sauvignon Blanc (yes, Israeli SB – which I am not usually a fan of, but this one is stellar). So overall, this was a really successful set of tastings any way you measure it. 

I am going to present the wines by flight – and not necessarily in the order we tasted them as we kept on retasting over the trip, and it got hard to keep that straight for me especially as we started out blind and then abandoned that.