Winemaker Notes
This wine is “Grands” before being Échézeaux. It is a country gentleman, aristocrat and dreamer, who idles willingly with the unhurried step of his horse in a forest filled with the scents of sundry mushrooms, mosses, decaying leaves and of furtive small game, which spill forth in a multitude of shifting alliances. All of that is expressed with feeling, in a refined language: musical, concise and pure like the message of a Mozart quartet.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Showing more colour as well as more weight and intensity than the Échézeaux, as it often does, this is also a much more complete, harmonious wine with more flesh on its bones. Stony, stemmy and peppery, it handles its 100% whole bunches with style. A hint of good reduction and leafy, autumnal, forest floor aromatics segue into a palate that has fine-grained new oak, refreshing minerality and sweet, beguiling, wild strawberry fruit.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
More brooding and reserved than the Échézeaux that preceded it in the tasting, the 2017 Grands Échézeaux Grand Cru unwinds in the glass with an enticing bouquet of cassis, blackberries, blood orange, exotic spices and musk. On the palate, it's full-bodied, ample and fleshy, with a more introverted, structured profile than the Échézeaux, its considerable reserves of concentrated fruit framed by an abundance of powdery tannin and succulent acids. Long and penetrating, this will reward sustained bottle age. The Grands Échézeaux was picked on September 12.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Claiming the two famous Grand Crus, Echezeaux and Grands Echezeaux, the identity of this village, Flagey-Echezeaux, rides predominantly on the glory of those two crus. All of the village or Premier Cru status vineyards in Flagey-Echezeaux market themselves under the name of their neighbor, Vosne-Romanée.
Echezeaux Pinot noir tends be light, bright and full of finesse, whereas those of Grands Echezeaux typically have more heft and complexity.