Continuing with my posts on my most recent tasting trip to Paris with David Raccah of Kosherwinemusings.com, after our trip to IDS, we quickly made our way to the next tasting of the day, with Christophe Bardeau of Domaine Roses Camille and Ben Sitruk of WineSymphony.fr, who is the distributor of all of Christophe’s output. This tasting was really to catch me up on the most recent top-end wines, as David had already tasted all or most of these in California – so I do appreciate everyone’s indulgence in catching me up. I am also sure David didn’t mind, as it gave him an opportunity to taste the Pomerol wines after retasting the Le Gay a day earlier.

Drinking with Christophe is always a trip. It is almost unique in the kosher wine world to have a winemaker who so intimately knows the vineyards from which the wine is made. I would guess that perhaps outside of the Cohen Family of Elvi, and Benyo at Four Gates, no other kosher winemaker is involved from start to finish in growing and harvesting the grapes and then making the wine. There may be others, but that’s who comes to mind. More than that, the vineyards have been in Christophe’s family for quite some time, and, as such, he simply grew up amongst the vines. He uses no lab to test ripeness, brix or pH levels. He simply bites into a grape in the vineyards and gauges whether or not it is time to pick. It’s fascinating. On top of that, he is a mensch and really easy to talk to with no pretentiousness at all – despite having literally a perfect record in terms of never having made a bad kosher wine. I don’t know anyone else who can boast this – I mean everyone has a miss here and there – or almost everyone. Part of the reason for this is that, due to the small production, literally everything is in Christophe’s control – from when to pick, to when to release the wine. As such we are now tasting wines from the 2016-2018 vintages, while the rest of the wine world is trying to wrap their heads around the penetrable 22’s. That is not to say that the 2018’s from Roses Camille and Roses Louise are ready. Far from it – as you will see below. But it does give him much greater control, and he simply will not release a wine until he feels it is ready.

As I mentioned, we tasted these wines the day after the Royal tasting, where we had tasted the Le Gay. At the time, David warned me that I was going to have a tough time as really, we have NEVER had this many kosher Pomerol wines on the market at once that we can judge against each other – and the competition would be close (remember – I gave the Le Gay a 95 – so I was excited!) But, we’ll give it a go.