Above are my tasting notes for the Fall Wine Preview my friend Josh hosted last week at Spring Boutique, the retail wing of Daniel Rose's mini-empire in Paris 1èr.
Public retail tastings are ordinarily kind of boring. I don't always take notes. Unless a particularly great vigneron is involved*, you often get just a thin crowd of goggle-eyed wine neophytes eagerly swirling and sniffing a range of easy-sell barbecue wines - whatever the distribution rep needed to unload on the retailer.
Spring Boutique isn't really on the same planet as that kind of wine shop. What's available here is continually rotated through the stunning wine lists at the nearby Spring restaurant and wine bar. In a previous post about the wine bar I mentioned how the glass pours there all seem chosen particularly for dramatic effect; how all of them are eminently memorable examples of their types. Same goes for the selections here. Josh and co. deserve further credit for actively seeking out interesting wines by producers that are not French - Les Crêtes, from Italy's Valle d'Aosta, and R. Lopez de Heredia from Spain, to name just two.
If you really want a blow-by-blow of the Fall Wine Preview, you're welcome to attempt to decipher the notes above. Listing wines and describing them gets a little boring unless you're about to drink those very wines, so I've tried not to structure this blog that way. I'll just mention the highlights:
