When I first made the decision to bump my visits to France to twice a year, I expected to have less wine to taste per trip. These trips to France are always with my friend David Raccah of Kosher Wine Musings, and he has been doing this twice a year since the start. When I started joining six or seven years ago, I would only come once a year, and often times, in order to accommodate me, we would ask that certain wines be tasted, even though David had already tasted on the last trip. By no means did we retaste all, but here and there – and so I expected the average number of wines that I would taste would drop per trip as they were now spread out over two trips. I was very wrong. Not because of my logic, which was sound, but because Menachem Israelievitch and Royal wines produced an obscene amount of kosher wine for the 2022 vintage. This tasting consisted of an incredible 58 wines and required two full days to complete. Thankfully, 2022 has turned out to be a wonderful vintage for the big Bordeaux wines. I will save my vintage roundup for the end of this series of four posts on this trip, but bottom line – the 2022 big wines are great.

But if I can say a few words specifically about Royal, the sheer number of wines that they produced and the organization and logistics that goes into that is just incredible. Menachem has upped Royal’s game year after year – with no drop in quality at all. There are no “dropped balls.” This is not true of most other kosher producers, most of whom manage a fraction of the production that Mr. Israelievitch does. The win percentage here is incredible. I think there are 40 wines with a score of 91 (or above and of those there are 15 with a 93 or above! I mean WOW. It’s just a stunning showing and just shows that, while Royal has expanded its lineup, it has done so judiciously and with care and we are now reaping the benefits!

This post is late enough (I got back about a month ago but have been buried with work) – so I will skip all of the story telling and maybe just save that for the last post. This one really deserves to be about the wines because they are for the most part phenomenal. Just a couple of words of caution. All of these wines are EXTREMELY young. In fact, as opposed to, let’s say, 2020 where the wines were somewhat enjoyable on release, these wines are far from that. What I am scoring here is based on what I am able to discern from the wine today. Just because a wine gets a 93 does NOT mean it is ready to drink today. Many of these wines will need 10 or even 20 years before they are really hitting their stride – and some even longer. These are the classic French wines of a great vintage that you want to lay down and forget about for a long, long time. I say this because often with the best wines, when they are tasted too soon, they are deeply disappointing. I don’t put drinking windows in my published notes (I am not a Navi and don’t want to be responsible for someone missing the window, as really, this is all just guesswork and an estimation based on experience and in this case a single snapshot of the wine that was tasted at this point in time), but I do keep them for myself – and so if anyone has a question, I am happy to answer  it privately – but assume that NONE of the big wines are remotely ready for drinking unless I write otherwise. Also, as I have noted before, some of these tastings are “snapshot” tastings in a very real sense. We are tasting the wine once – and if we are lucky, we can watch it evolve over a couple of hours. But that’s it. Will they change in a year or two?  Well, if I had a few days with a wine, I could get a better sense of its evolution – though it would still be imperfect. And of course I am not retasting year after year and posting new notes – unless I just happen to run into an opportunity. In fact, Menachem had us blind taste three wines of the 2021 vintage. I can say that one wine did improve by two points, one wine stayed exactly the same, and one wine dropped a point and a half (and it was a wine I liked!) Now sure – the wine that improved perhaps deserves a better score and the wine that dropped maybe should drop, but it’s not like we got to sit with those wines either – it was just another snapshot tasting – and it just goes to prove my point. No one can 100% predict how a wine will evolve and age. You can only give your best guess – especially with a snapshot tasting such as this. For the most part, I am usually in the ballpark and do not regret my notes. Every once in the while I am surprised that a wine either didn’t live up to or surpassed expectations. Such is life. Lastly while I often make generalizations regarding a given vintage – that doesn’t mean that it a 100% absolute truth for all wines. Having said that – there is vintage typicity. If 2021 had candied Jalapeno notes in MANY (if not most) wines – 2022 has descriptors and characteristics that come up over and over again (ripe, dark, black, sometimes floral, dense, etc.)  – and that is something that you cannot escape in Bordeaux.

But I digress – I’ll get back to all of this when I give my vintage wrap up as part of the last post in this series.

Now, on to the notes.