Blog Archives
The Kosherwine.com French wine options
With the new year, I wanted to repeat my rules of engagement with wine. Also, with the continued plethora of people writing about wine and selling them as well, I decided to remind my readers, I DO NOT shill. I do not take money or free wines. I pay for my wines and I write about them, no matter what others think. I do go to wine tastings and yes, at that time I do not pay for the wines, but neither does anyone else at the wine tasting. So, yes, I bought these wines from kosherwine.com and I am posting my notes about them. I am also adding my notes about a few wines that I tasted at YC’s house when he had a few Kosherwine.com wines as well. Those notes and the tasting can be found here, and I will post them at the end, just for completeness.
Many of these wines are produced by Louis Blanc, a producer that makes lower level wines at very reasonable prices. Sadly, when they get here, the prices are somewhat elevated. Depending on the location you can find the Brouilly below for 10 euro or so, but here in the USA, it goes for 23 dollars or so. Figure in the shipping, the extra hand (AKA extra person/company) in the mix and you get the price you get. Still, some of the wines are nice enough to buy, IMHO.
Sadly, the best reasonably priced French Bordeaux wine, that I have tasted so far, that costs, in France some 11 euro, would be the 2014 Chateau Grand Barrail, Prestige, Red. It is far better than any of these wines listed here, other than the crazy good 2016 Chateau Guimberteau, Lalande de Pomerol, but that is 4x the price!
I wanted to keep this simple, so the wine notes follow below – the explanation of my “scores” can be found here:
2012 Louis Blanc La Gravelle Chinon, Cuvee Terroir – Score: 90 (QPR)
This wine has changed since the last time I had it. It is showing far better than the clearly bad bottle I had in Israel. This wine is made from 100% Cabernet Franc. The nose on this wine starts off a bit funky, with time it opens to show lovely barnyard, mushroom, with a rich garden of green notes, earthy, foliage bomb, with crazy raspberry, red fruit, showing loads of floral and tart notes. The mouth on this medium bodied wine is nice and layered, and restrained, with nice elegance, showing green notes, soft tannin, and bell pepper, lovely with lovely balancing acid! The finish is long and green, with hints of leather, tobacco, and rosemary. Nice! Drink now through 2019!
2012 Louis Blanc Duc de Serteil Coteaux Bourguignons – Score: 86
This wine is a blend of 60% Gamay and 40% Pinot Noir. The nose on this wine is a bit closed, but with air, it opens to cherry notes, Kirshe, with olives, green notes, herbs, and strawberry, with currant, and foliage. The mouth on this medium bodied wine is a bit too simple, it shows great acidity, with nice enough notes, but the metallic notes and soft tannins make it a bit too simple. The finish is average and nice enough, with more herb, and cherry red notes. Drink UP!
Kosherwine.com’s recent kosher French wine selection
As you can tell, I am finally getting to posting on my blog again. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to taste through Kosherwine.com‘s new French wine imports.
Look, I get it, most people do not care who imported what, they want to know what wine is available where. All, I am adding here is that these wines are kosherwine.com’s work and effort to import them.
A few of these names (like Louis Blanc) were imported in the past by either Victor Wines, out of Hollywood, FL, or others. To most, the only difference will be the change of the name on the back of the wine label.
I enjoyed the range of wines brought in, and I really enjoyed that many of them are reasonably priced, even if they are not crazy wines. Also, I liked the magnum sized wine they brought in, allowing for enjoying a casual dinner with friends and family, without needing to be pretentious and snooty, at the same time!
The wine notes follow below – the explanation of my “scores” can be found here:
2014 Louis Blanc Beaujolais, Moulin-A-Vent – Score: 88
This wine is made from 100% Gamay. The wine shows a nice nose of earth, red fruit, spice, and rich loam, with some good smoke. The mouth on this medium bodied wine is nice, light in weight, but with good acid and lovely sweet tannin, that is backed by good herb, menthol, foliage, and floral notes. The finish is nice with coffee, earth, red fruit, and spice. Drink till 2019
2015 Louis Blanc Beaujolais, Julienas – Score: 89
This wine is made from 100% Gamay. This is the next level in terms of Gamay, with really good bright fruit, red raspberry, currant, with smoke, loam, and great fruit. The mouth on this medium bodied wine is fuller in the mouth than the Moulin-A-Vent, with ripe red fruit, raspberry, black plum, and good nice tannin structure, with nice sweet strawberry, and crazy floral notes. The finish is long and sweet, with good fruit, tannin, and rich earth. Nice. Drink till 2020. Read the rest of this entry
Kosher Beaujolais wines
Beaujolais Nouveau, if you have never heard of this wine, that is because you do not live in France and because we have not had a kosher one for two years or so. It is a wine made from the Gamay fruit and one that is quick to be released.
Now there is another wine from the same region, Beaujolais. The Nouveau style wine uses Carbonic Maceration that makes the wine feel sloppy, but gives you really fruity notes, along with weird notes and flavors of fermentation and an incomplete wine. Having made wine myself, with the help of Josh Rynderman, allowed me to watch the entire process of wine making, and it showed me the must/fermentation notes that I am seeing in the Nouveau. Having watched the wine process from end-to-end, I can say that it took time for the wine to leave its pure fruit and must/fermentation state. My Pinot was still smelling like that into December. This Nouveau is bottled 6-8 weeks after harvest!
Now the manner that the Nouveau is produced should normally allow for early release, using a technique called Carbonic Maceration. Carbonic maceration ferments most of the juice while it is still inside the grape. The result is a wine with lighter tannins and fruity wine.
Tasting the two wines was interesting. I will say that it is great that kosherwine.com went out and created a kosher Beaujolais Nouveau! Sadly, it is not a wine for my tastes. The other Beaujolais was very nice, but the 2012 vintage is already starting to fall apart, so drink that up now! There is a new 2013 vintage that I hope to taste soon.
My tasting notes are below:
2016 Duc De Pagny Beaujolais Nouveau – Score: B to B+
Yes, this is a simple wine, like Beaujolais is supposed to be, but it is not my style of wine. The nose is tart with raspberry, esters of grape and fermentation, and overall simple aromas. The mouth is tart and has just enough fruit and tannin to make it work, with strawberry notes, banana, and sour cherry. The acid plays with red fruit, a bit of earth, nice spice, and more fermentation notes.
2012 Beaujolais Cotes de Brouilly – Score: B+ to A- (QPR)
Sadly, this wine is falling apart quickly. Do not open and let rest, this is a wine that is fragile now, so open and drink it within the hour.
Nice earthy nose with good spice, cherry, with dried raspberry, tobacco, and loam. Nice medium body with a simple body but firm attack, still showing great acid, though there is a slight hollow that is growing now with the wine falling off, but showing nice fruit that gives way to nice extraction, boysenberry, graphite, mineral, and great spice. The finish is nice with cloves, smoke, and earth that mingles well with great acid and cherry fruit, dark plum, and more spice. Drink UP!
My top kosher 25 wines of 2016
Well, I have posted my year in review, and now I wanted to get to my top wines for 2016. Please beware that I know I missed many wines and that this list does not include wines that I have tasted that are not available on the open market.
I wanted to make this post short and sweet – so the criteria are simple I could care less about price, color, or where it was made. All that matters is that it is/was available this year sometime to the public at large and that I tasted it in a reliable environment, not just at a tasting, and that it was scored an A- to A or higher. Also, there are a few lower scoring wines here because of their uniqueness or really good QPR. I also included some of the ebst wines I tasted this year – they are at the bottom.
On an aside, there continues to be a whole mess of madness around wines notes and scores, even the Jewish Week weighed in on the matter. So, let me explain this really simply – go look at some of my recent blog posts – they talk about some nice enough wines, but wines I would not specifically buy. They have all the nice words and such, which were all true and to the point. But without the final value score, I can tell you a Cabernet is full bodied with good fruit and spice – and you may say cool I want that – but then I would say well, yeah but it was not complex or layered. You could try to reason that out of the words I wrote, because the words complex and layered are missing. However, the simple fact that it was scored a B+ or whatever, would have told you that it is not always a wine worth going after (unless it is the Terrenal or such where it gets a QPR moniker).
My point being that wine notes – without a proper context (AKA a real score) – is like looking at a wedding hall through a slit in the window. Sure you can “see” the hall, but are you really sure you want to get married there? I never scored wines to tell people to listen to my score. I score wines to set the context and to always read the notes to see if that sort of wine works for you!
I posted this about my scores – and what they mean, so I hope these are useful to you. OK, enough of the darn score rant for the day, back to the matters at hand, being wines of the year. The list is long – get over it. It is a list of wines that I would buy, have bought, and will buy again – simple enough I hope. I hope you enjoy!
2014 Elvi Wines EL 26 – Score: A- to A
This wine is a blend of 45% Carignan, 35% Grenache, and 20% Syrah. This wine is showing far more accessible than previous vintages. The 2014 vintage in Spain makes fro wines that are easily approachable now and yet has the power to last a long time. The nose on this wine is fruit forward with dark candied raspberry, blackberry, and spiced boysenberry, with root beer and earth, showing spice, anise, and cranberry. The mouth is beautiful and controlled, with great mouth coating tannin, sheer elegance, with great sweet and focused fruit, lovely extraction, showing ripe and tart strawberry, raspberry, and boysenberry all mixed together into a compote, with black fruit and earth. The finish is ridiculous, some of the best of the evening, with sweet fruit and ripe structure, yet balanced and focused, with coffee, leather, and sweet spices, nutmeg, and mineral galore, with scraping graphite, BRAVO!!
2014 Capcanes Peraj Habib – Score A- to A
This wine is a blend of 45% Grenache, 35% Cabernet Sauvignon, and 20% Carignan. This wine is showing far more accessible than previous vintages. The 2014 vintage in Spain makes fro wines that are easily approachable now and yet has the power to last a long time. The nose on this wine shows nicely, with chocolate and oak, along with crazy red fruit, roasted animal, toast, graphite, and lovely smoke, with floral notes galore. What a lovely wine, full bodied with great extraction, ripping acid and great crazy tannin that gives way to blueberry, blackberry, lovely cherry, and insane fruit focus that is backed by intense graphite, and mineral, scraping mineral, with mouth drying tannin all coming together into a far more accessible wine than any year before. The wine is really young but accessible, with insane fruit and mineral all coming together. The finish is long and epic, with leather, and rich extraction lingering with coffee and sweet spices coming together beautifully. Bravo!
2013 Covenant Cabernet Sauvignon, Solomon lot 70 – Score: A- to A
Really lovely but pushed nose, with ripe black fruit, tar galore, with garrigue, earth, and rich blackberry. The mouth on this full bodied wine is rich and extracted, showing an impressive attack with rich focus of blueberry, intense gripping tannin, spicy oak, sweet dill galore, with massive almost tactile mouth showing black fruit focus, with impressive inky structure that gives way to black and blue fruit. The finish is long and spicy, with green notes, foliage, good dirt, all wrapped with dark chocolate, leather, tobacco heaven, more green notes, and rich Asian spices.
2014 Elvi Clos Mesorah – Score: A- to A
This wines a blend of 50% Grenache, 35% Carignan from vines that are 105 years old, and 15% Syrah. Wow what a California Syrah nose, with intense root beer, watermelon, crazy how this smells like Shirah Syrah, with blueberry, and boysenberry, and spiced plum punch. The mouth on this full bodied wine wow, the mouth is full bodied, extracted, and crazy rich, with layers of extraction and concentrated fruit, showing searing tannin, ripping acid, that gives way to black and blue fruit, blackberry, plum, with crazy chocolate and coffee coming together to show mouth drying tannin, with earth, spice, cloves, black pepper, and spicy, with heady spice and blue fruit. The finish is long and spicy, with sweet spice and fruit that gives way to chocolate, roasted meat, and graphite. Really impressive wine bravo!
2010 ELvi Wines Rioja Reserva – Score: A- to A
Wow what a glass of umami, pure hedonism, bravo! The nose on this wine is pure joy, with root beer, blueberry, roasted meat, black pepper, mushroom, dirt, smoke, and toast. The mouth on this medium bodied wine is far more accessible than the 09, with sweet fruit, earth, dirt, sweet blue fruit, crazy candied and juicy blue fruit, that gives way to cherry, candied and spiced raspberry, with mouth coating and drying tannin, rich juicy and concentrated fruit, with insane focus and attack. The finish is long and juicy, with sweet fruit, nutmeg, sweet baking spices, milk chocolate, smoke, and crazy spices, anise and licorice. Bravo!