Blog Archives
A tasting of Domaine Roses Camille’s latest releases and Taieb wines
After the tasting and the Herzog KFWE LA VIP Experience, I drove down to San Diego. When GG drives down it is easy to sit in the passenger seat, but doing the driving myself, with all that traffic, UGH! Still, once I was down in San Diego I made my way to Parisien Gourmandises, where I picked up a great lunch sandwich, some lovely Croissant, and a nice pear tarte. I enjoyed the Croissant with some Starbucks coffee (I hear you sneering Elk, be quiet, I have no time for your foo-foo coffee predilections). With all that said, if you are in the San Diego area, I would happily recommend Parisien Gourmandises. After my coffee fuel, I made my way to the home of Kosher Liquids, Andrew Breskin in sunny San Diego! Andrew and Shauna Breskin are the best hosts out there and I always feel at home in their surroundings. Mind you that is Dr. Shauna Breskin, or very soon, to be a Doctor, when at that point she will start taking over universities in desperate need of management and a conscience.
After a quick look around and a chance to enjoy my lunch sandwich, it was time to get to work, tasting through all the new wines.
Wines in the tasting
I continue to question the validity of the love and hype being heaped upon the 2022 Bordeaux vintage, at least among the kosher options, so far. Of what I have tasted it has not reached anywhere near 2019, 2016, or 2014, and even 2015. So, time will tell. At this tasting, we had a couple of 2022 Bordeaux from Taeib Wines, but the stars of the show and the stars of any wines I have tasted so far this year were the 2018 releases from Domaine Roses Camille. Still, there were some very nice 2022 options from Bordeaux.
My last post regarding the incredible Domaine Roses Camille highlighted some of the wines I tasted at this event, which, again, can be found here, those were the 2020 Chateau Les Graves de Lavaud, Lalande de Pomerol, and the 2020 Clos Lavaud, Lalande de Pomerol. These two wines continue to show the power of Pomerol, the right bank, and how we can get great wines for a reasonable price.
Next was the best QPR (Quality to Price Ratio) wine I have tasted so far this year, the 2018 Echo de Roses Camille, WOW, that is a wine that would have been the best wine of the year in 2022, when things were a bit slow. The 2019 Echo de Roses Camille was too closed for me to get a real sense of the wine and sadly, I could not return to taste it again, in the morning because of circumstances beyond my control. I hope to taste it again soon, so the score below is a temporary one and is not official. Andrew threw in a 2012 Echo, a wine I have not had in some time and that wine is in the window, for sure, but has loads of gas in the tank, no rush on that one!
The best wine of the evening was the 2018 Domaine Roses Louise, the grapes for which are sourced from a different vineyard than those for the Camille. This wine is not new, it has been produced and sold non-Kosher for many years. This is the first vintage of a kosher Domaine de Roses Louise. We also tasted the 2017 Domaine Roses Camille, and while that wine was nice, it showed far riper than when we had it in January 2023. Still, it is a nice wine, though, at this point, from this tasting, I wonder about its longevity.
Next came the Taieb wines, and a couple of them I had already tasted in Paris, you can see those notes here and they tasted the same, which makes sense as it has only been a few months since late May. Those would be the two new wines from Chateau Tour Perey, the 2022 Chateau Tour Perey, and the 2022 Chateau La Fleur Perey. By the way, they are two QPR WINNER, so yeah, enjoy!!
After those two, we enjoyed four wines from the 2022 vintage, three of them are well-known producers from the Taieb wine portfolio and one is a new winery. The new wine is the 2022 Chateau de Come, a very nice wine indeed, and another option from Saint-Estephe, a region that has not been hitting it on all cylinders, in regards to Kosher wine production, but this one will help! The other three are the 2022 Chateau Castelbruck, the 2022 Chateau Haut-Breton Larigaudiere, and the 2022 Château Roquettes. These wines showed control and pop and are a good sign for the rest of the 2022 kosher wines from Bordeaux that are yet to be released.
After tasting the wines, the kids arrived from school, and then Elk and Alex Rubin made their entrance. It was fun tasting with Alex at Herzog Winery and it was interesting tasting with him again that night. Everyone has the things they like in wine but Alex has a very different approach to wine tasting and I enjoy tasting with him.
The evening continued with the appearance of the queen of the house, Doctor-to-be Shauna, and then Andrew cooked dinner. It was a truly enjoyable evening. After that more folks swung by and we moved outside. It was a lovely evening and a lovely day for all.
My thanks to Andrew and Shauna Breskin for hosting the tasting and for putting up with me and everyone else who crashed their home for an entire day! The notes speak for themselves.
The wine notes follow below in the order that they were tasted. The explanation of my “scores” can be found here and the explanation for QPR scores can be found here:
2020 Clos Lavaud, Lalnde de Pomerol – Score: 92 (QPR: WINNER)
The nose of this wine is crazy closed but lovely with rich cherry, raspberry, loam, dense violet, rich clay, rock, and gravel, lovely! The mouth of this full-bodied wine is dense, rich, layered, scraping, and refreshing but so astringent at this point that it is inhuman to taste, with rich loam, dirt, clay, minerality, intense acidity, black and red fruit, black plum, raspberry, cherry, and scraping graphite. The finish is long, dark, brooding, smoky, and earthy, with minerality, acidity, and fruit interplaying at all times. Fun! Drink from 2025 until 2030. (tasted September 2024) (in San Diego, CA) (ABV = 14%)
2020 Chateau Les Graves de Lavaud, Lalande de Pomerol – Score: 92 (QPR: WINNER)
The nose of this wine is deeply floral, with rosehip, violet, dense minerality, dense clay, rich gravel, and tart red fruit, really lovely. The mouth of this medium-plus bodied wine is lovely, tart, precise, floral, deeply acidic, fresh, and refreshing, with vibrant sour red cherry, raspberry, and rhubarb, with intense minerality, rich dense tannin, intense clay, gravel, and rich rock, lovely! The finish is long, tart, refreshing, grippy, gripping tannin, slate, rock, and graphite, Fun! Drink from 2025 to 2029. (tasted September 2024) (in San Diego, CA) (ABV = 14%)
2018 Echo de Roses Camille, Pomerol – Score: 94 (QPR: WINNER)
The nose of this wine is lovely, with a classic Echo nose of wax, lanolin, and yellow flowers, some espresso chocolate, sweet oak, garrigue, loam, minerality, and roasted herbs. The mouth of this full-bodied wine has my attention, with intense acidity, gripping tannins, rich fruit, layers upon layers of concentrated and complex fruit, rich raspberry, plum, dark cherry, and strawberry, all wrapped in elegance, power, intense minerality, verve, and garrigue, wow! The minerality, tannin, acidity, and complex red fruit all work together to build a bombastic wine that is just impressive! So impressive to be doing with just red fruit. The finish is long, tannin, bold, big, and rich, with more coffee chocolate, graphite, pencil shavings, iron shavings, lovely salinity, green olives, and rich smoke. Drink from 2030 until 2040. (tasted September 2024) (in San Diego, CA) (ABV = 14.5%)
A Domaine Roses Camille (AKA DRC) tasting in Paris with Christophe Bardeau – November 2023
I continue my tastings on my trip to Paris in November and this post focuses on wines we enjoyed from Domaine Roses Camille. I have posted often about wines from DRC, including my most recent post on DRC wines. My post here, tells of the story of DRC and this one tells of a lovely gathering I was invited to with DRC wines.
As Avi posted in his first post about this trip to Paris, we wanted to get him to see a bit of Paris on this trip, it was time! So, after the tasting at IDS, we were going to get him to the Musée de l’Orangerie, to see the gorgeous Monet tableau of the lilies, but Ben, God bless him, had other plans when he opened the world to taste! God bless you Ben we will get Avi to see them soon, B”H!
Once we had tasted the wines at IDS, Avi Davidowitz, from the Kosher Wine Unfiltered blog, and I walked not too far to meet with Christophe Bardeau, the winemaker of Domaine Roses Camille, and Ben Sitruk, the DRC distributor in France, and the owner of the kosher wine website – WineSymphony.fr. A slight aside here, Wine Symphony is one of the best sites for kosher wine in France, but hey that is just my biased opinion. I really need to do a post, a rather quick one, regarding the best places to get wines in Paris and Europe, look for that one soon.
Avi and I arrived to a quiet street in Paris, turned left, and then it was the game of – which door is the address? It took us longer than it should have, I think, these office buildings in Paris are not easy to find! We got to the office in time and there was Christophe, the mad scientist behind the hugely successful Domaine Roses Camille wines. We spoke in English and that was fine with Ben and Christophe, as they are pretty fluent.
There was a lot of food and wine at this event. The food came from Chef Nerwin Guzman’s restaurant Etnikahn. The wine was brought in by Christophe, it included some barrel samples, which I will not be talking about. Mostly because they are just babies, but as I told Christophe at the tasting, they were quite enjoyable. I will just say this, look forward to some really special things, the rest will be revealed, I am sure in due time, by either Christophe, Ben, or Andrew of Liquid Kosher.
I will say that at this point, Domaine Roses Camille is a 100% Kosher winery. That does not mean that the earlier vintages of many of the wines are kosher. What it means is that from 2020 all wines from Domaine Roses Camille are kosher. The winery is still releasing older non-kosher wines, but that will soon come to an end. I think I will leave it at that.
So, in the process of turning the winery 100% kosher, one of the last plots to turn kosher was the Chateau Les Graves de Lavaud. It is in the Lalande de Pomerol and if the 2020 vintage is of any indication – that is one very nice vineyard!
We started with the 2020 Chateau Les Graves de Lavaud and then we went on to the 2019 & 2020 Clos Lavaud, the original QPR (Quality to Price Ratio) warrior!!
We then got to taste the 2016 vintage of Domaine Roses Camille Grand Vin de Bordeaux, Pomerol, which I tasted in January alongside many of its older brothers. The 2014 vintage was finally starting to open and in the vertical we had, in San Diego, it was the one I liked the most, at that moment, anyway. These wines are still babies, but hopefully, one day I will finally get a chance to pop one in their window! The 2011 was so deeply mineral that it was shocking, but you can read more about the wines there.
There was another wine poured at the tasting along with some rather uninteresting food items shared with us. The wine will appear in the next post, while for the food item, I will say this, my deep lack of happiness eating it/them, will probably revoke my Tunisian membership. I apologize to my ancestors, but seriously, what were you guys thinking??? I have no idea! Enough said! Thanks so much, Ben for caring and wanting to make me more Tunisian, but once again, I embarrass my family, that is my black spot to bear!
Domaine Roses Camille wines are available from Ben Sitruk’s site and other online sites throughout Europe, while the wines are available, or will be very soon, in the USA from Andrew Breskin and his site – Liquid Kosher. For those in Miami and its surrounds, Elchonon Hellinger, aka Elk, also has a stock of these wines and other Domaine Roses Camille wines, so reach out to him as well. His contact info, like Andrew’s, is to the right on this blog.
My many thanks to both Christophe Bardeau and Ben Sitruk for hosting us so beautifully and sharing their beautiful wines and food with us. The wine notes follow below – the explanation of my “scores” can be found here and the explanation for QPR scores can be found here:
2020 Chateau Les Graves de Lavaud, Lalande de Pomerol – Score: 92 (QPR: WINNER)
The nose of this wine is deeply floral, with rosehip, violet, dense minerality, dense clay, rich gravel, and tart red fruit, really lovely.
The mouth of this medium-plus bodied wine is lovely, tart, precise, floral, deeply acidic, fresh, and refreshing, with vibrant sour red cherry, raspberry, and rhubarb, with intense minerality, rich dense tannin, intense clay, gravel, and rich rock, lovely!
The finish is long, tart, refreshing, grippy, gripping tannin, slate, rock, and graphite, Fun! Drink from 2025 to 2029. (tasted November 2023) (in Paris, France) (ABV = 14%)
2020 Clos Lavaud, Lalnde de Pomerol – Score: 92 (QPR: WINNER)
The nose of this wine is crazy closed but lovely with rich cherry, raspberry, loam, dense violet, rich clay, rock, and gravel, lovely!
The mouth of this full-bodied wine is dense, rich, layered, scraping, and refreshing but so astringent at this point that it is inhuman to taste, with rich loam, dirt, clay, minerality, intense acidity, black and red fruit, black plum, raspberry, cherry, and scraping graphite.
The finish is long, dark, brooding, smoky, and earthy, with minerality, acidity, and fruit interplaying at all times. Fun! Drink from 2025 until 2030. (tasted November 2023) (in Paris, France) (ABV = 14%)
2019 Clos Lavaud, Lalande de Pomerol – Score: 93 (QPR: WINNER)
The nose of this wine is a beast showing pure minerality, dark fruit, smoke, and rich herbs. The nose of tar, mineral, graphite, rock, loam, and rich smoke, covers and wraps the rich fruit. Bravo!
The mouth of this full-bodied wine is intense, layered, rich, dense, and rich tannin, with incredible acidity, and crazy precision, showing blackberry, plum, dark cherry, rich smoke, and incredible extraction showing an expression that is just insane.
The finish is long, and extracted, with scraping graphite, rich loam, roasted herb, loam, clay, and rich green/black fruit. Wow, this cannot happen without a deep balance between the fruit, acidity, and minerality. Drink from 2025 until 2032. (tasted November 2023) (in Paris, France) (ABV = 14%)
Wine Musings Blog 