Selecting the wines we’re going to serve at our tastings is both lots of fun and very challenging. Lots of fun for obvious reasons.

Very challenging because we are very demanding in our wine selection.  We don’t serve you just any wine. Here’s a little more info on how we select our wines.

- Where do we find them? We usually buy all of our wines straight from the wineries. Before buying them, we’ve got to spot the little gems we’d like to serve our clients. Several ways to do this:

• First,  at the wineries. We all do our share of exploration of the French wine regions. Winemakers frequently save some bottles for the people they trust will appreciate their “special” wine. That’s what we’re after.
• Then, as wine professionals, many winemakers and agents come to us to have us taste their wines and see if we’d like to buy from them. We taste dozens of wines a week this way. A handful wines a year makes the cut.
• We also taste a lot at professional tastings where we can taste up to 100 wines in one day. Count a few of these every semester: it adds-up!
• Then… life: at a restaurant, at a friend’s place… opportunities to discover a great bottle are many if you hang with the right people!

- How do we choose them? We have rather strict criteria to include new wines to our selection. First, we need to love it. That is the most important rule. When you come to a tasting at O Chateau, your sommelier would always drink at his own home the wines he serves you that day.  But besides loving a wine, our main criteria to select it are:

• Good taste: we believe that wine should be good. As opposed to many wineries that offer wine tastings, our goal is not to sell you some wine. Our goal is for you to enjoy your wine tasting. So we don’t serve you “wines that’ll be good in four or five years”. We serve you good wine. That is wine we like. Wine each one of our sommeliers agreed upon.
• Good value: we are not sponsored by wineries. We buy each and every one of the bottles we serve you. So it is important for us to find good wine at a good price. Mechanically, if we get good value, so do our clients.
• Expressive of their terroir: if you don’t know that word, it’s ok, we’ll clarify this at the tasting. But basically, what we care for here is that each wine you taste at O Chateau takes you somewhere. That each wine we serve captures the unique vibe of the place it’s from. That each one of the wines you’ll taste at O Chateau has a soul, a real signature. Simply because we believe that this is what wine is about.
• Helpful for our clients: (now what is that supposed to mean right?!) The idea here is simply that we want you to leave the room with a much clearer vision of French wines. For each region, we serve you a wine that is somewhat representative of the region it’s from so that you can see for yourself the regions and the style of wines you will like the most in France.
• Made by good people: As much as possible, we like to buy wine from people we like. Some wines are just so good, we can’t help but buying it even if the wineaker is a prick but all in all, it is important for us to like the vignerons and winemakers we work with. Might be silly but it’s important to us.

All of the wines you will taste at the tasting you can buy from us. Plus many others. Just make sure to ask your sommelier at the end of your tasting. We have a wide and exciting variety of wines that we do not necessarily display: older vintages, exceptional bottles…

Buy Some Wine?…

Now, we are soon to be able to start shipping wines to the US. So stay tuned and come back in just a few weeks to order some good French wines from us!