The Gift Box Selection
This gift box brings together 4 wines from 4 of France’s most iconic appellations. From Bordeaux’s classified growths to Burgundy’s legendary wines, discover a piece of history with every sip.
The Tasting
Pro tip: There’s an ideal order for tasting wines. Start with sparkling wines, then move on to whites and rosés, followed by reds, and finish with sweet wines. The idea is to build up the intensity to excite your taste buds without overwhelming them.
The wines are presented in the ideal tasting order.
Preparing for the tasting
• Our tasting gift boxes are designed to give you the best possible tasting experience. It’s up to you whether you taste all the wines in the box at once or spread the experience over several evenings!
• Our vials contain enough wine for 2 people to taste the selection.
• Bear in mind that the wines shouldn’t all be served at the same temperature. Please check the ideal serving temperature in the gift box leaflet or in the wine descriptions below.
A good glass makes a real difference to how you experience a wine: its shape affects how aromas are concentrated towards your nose at the top of the glass, how much the wine is aerated depending on the surface exposed to air, and even the wine’s temperature depending on how much of it touches the glass.
To start with, we recommend using "INAO" glasses, whose shape was scientifically designed to provide the best tasting experience for all types of wine.
Otherwise, any "tulip-shaped" glass will do nicely, allowing the aromas to develop in the glass and concentrate towards your nose.
A packet of plain, unsalted crackers will do perfectly to cleanse your palate between wines. The flour they contain helps absorb the taste of the previous wine and refresh your taste buds without leaving a new flavour in your mouth.
Alternatively, any neutral-tasting food will do the job : bread, pretzels and, above all, water! This helps prevent "palate fatigue", which happens when too many flavours build up at once.
The stages of wine tasting
• Clues to the wine’s age
Tilt the glass against a white background to tell a young wine from an older one.
• Clues to alcohol and glycerol levels, and residual sugar content
Keep the glass slightly tilted and swirl it gently to watch droplets form and run down the inside. These are the wine’s tears, or legs.
• The first nose
Tilt the glass to 45° and bring it towards your nose without swirling it to smell the initial aromas.
This stage is particularly useful for detecting wine faults: cork taint, a vinegary smell, oxidation or reduction.
• The second nose
Swirl the wine in the glass for a few seconds to aerate it and release its secondary aromas.
This should bring out other, less volatile aromas.
Take a small sip of wine and move it around your mouth with your tongue to coat every part of your mouth and pick up all the flavours.
The ultimate technique is retronasal olfaction: draw a little air in through your mouth while keeping the wine in it, then breathe out through your nose.
You can then swallow the wine or spit it into a small container provided for the purpose.
The connoisseur’s corner
The 1855 Classification
It is the most famous of all French wine classifications. In 1855, for the Paris Exposition Universelle, Napoleon III commissioned a classification of Bordeaux wines.
More than 160 years later, the 1855 classification has changed only twice and remains a benchmark despite widespread criticism.