Please contact me for private tasting parties on (646)322-3658 or email Karl@charlemagnefinewines.com

Category Archives: thoughts

Tar and Roses.

August 19 2016 posted by Karl Curran
Have you ever been invited into the wine cellar at a friends house? It pops and says something about the owner, you can tell what the person is like by the wines they choose. Its very similar to looking at their library, fascinating to get into the mind of the enigmatic type. These cellars vary from place to place. In Paris top private cellars will be exclusively French. Hong Kong is all about marquee names, brands with strong financial clout. In London you will find wines from all over the world. Overall London and New York are where you will find an even distribution and the most interesting cellars. Los Angeles has some amazing collections, dominated by local picks which are excellent, and the exciting thing is that a lot of the buyers are open to trying something new. Showing an unsuspecting buyer the beauty of a Meursault premier cru or a Cannubi Barolo is a...

A gastronome’s journey to entrepreneurship, part 2

November 17 2015 posted by Karl Curran
Voila, I said I wanted to do this professionally and now i’m doing it! I recently launched Charlemagne Wine Tasting Dinners. We have done three evenings so far; our last dinner was a moment of triumph. I am collaborating with a great chef, Mr. Graham Heldreth, who is helping me realize this dream. Graham worked at the Beverly Bouchon in Beverly Hills and is an extremely talented man with a desire to learn and please his guests. I look after the wines and Graham is preparing the menus. The style of cooking is modern American done to a high gastronomic level. The wines are all imported from France and Italy, and they too are of top pedigree. All of the clients so far are loving the experience with its tremendous cultural backdrop, loaded with history and accentuated by exciting facts about the wines and how they pair with the...

A gastronome’s journey to entrepreneurship, part 1

November 17 2015 posted by Karl Curran
I was young when I attended catering college in France. I must say, when I was there I had no clue how cool it was. I didn’t realize what a two star Michelin restaurant was even though I was working in one for my Easter holidays during that school year. I was working at Pierre Gagnaires’s place in a well know French ski resort for the Christmas break. That restaurant was my first taste of gastronomic cuisine. After I left France I got a job on the trading floor in London thanks to my fluent french. I was working as a currency broker during the bull market of the 90’s. Leverage was in and to all intents and purposes I was Jerry McGuire with an expense account. Being a currency options broker was almost like having baseball star status. I went to the best kitchens all over the world—Lucas Carton, Taillevent,...

Bordeaux Renaissance

March 28 2015 posted by Karl Curran
Due diligence is paramount if you are selling something as complicated as higher end French and Italian wines. The customers are passionate and have a thirst for knowledge. This is my point of view for the 2014 Bordeaux vintage and the current state of the market. Bordeaux wine is more than just wine, it’s a financial barometer, not in the same way as oil, gold, or real estate, however it moves in tandem with these asset classes. It can and does outperform them on yield. Recent seismic moves such as the collapse in the price of oil and volatility in global currency markets reflect instability. It seems there is a flight to quality, US assets are in high demand and naturally enough this had led to a strong dollar which is tremendously good news for Bordeaux. What happened to Bordeaux after 2010 is a grey area. It’s sadly a...

Bordeaux Market Shifts

April 12 2014 posted by Karl Curran
Bordeaux is like no other in the wine market. Every year around the last days of March and first few days of April, the wine press and buyers emerge excited to taste the new vintage. The custom has been to buy the wines en primeur (straight out of the barrel) for over three hundred years now. The wines are then delivered to buyers roughly three years after payment. The 64 million dollar question is how does the buyer know what he’s getting? That’s where tasters like Robert Parker come in. Parker has become a household name. There are others too such as Jancis Robinson and James Suckling. These tasters hold strong opinions, and it’s very true in the wine business that the pen is mightier than the sword. As a producer, if you’ve been given a medium score, it can result in huge financial losses. The grading system is...

Coffee in Firenze can be inspirational…

April 26 2013 posted by Karl Curran
Walking into a typical Italian café for breakfast, which in Italy is usually a café latte and a pastry for me. There is one particular pastry I love in Italy. It’s a donut filled with custard. Yum, really delicious and their coffee, made with an espresso poured into a jug of hot milk, is what dreams are made of. So this particular morning I was in Firenze, by all accounts one of the most beautiful cities on the face of God’s earth. I was kinda sleepy and needed that coffee to wake me up. As I entered the café, a lady was standing outside the door wearing a large coat. The weather was fairly balmy, and I could tell within two hours give or take, it was gonna be sticky hot. She had Kleenex tissues in one hand and socks and underwear in the other, all for sale. She...

Chateau d’Armajan Des Ormes, Sauternes France

March 27 2013 posted by Karl Curran
I made a cold call from my home in Pasadena, California, to the owners of Chateau Beauregard Ducasse in the Graves area of Bordeaux. The Perromat Family owns the estate, the French call it une exploitation. Exploitation is the French word for a farm, property, or general enterprise in the agricultural sector. In the world of wine in Bordeaux, especially the Medoc, there are few family owned and run estates. For the most part in the Medoc, they are owned and run by insurance companies, banks, major private equity groups and such-like. In the right bank and further south in the Graves appellations, some families have held onto the land and still run the estates. The average size of a property on the right bank is considerably smaller to that of the left bank. The right bank averages out at roughly seven hectares; if I am not mistaken, in the...