Winemaker Notes
Ruby color with purple reflects, intense and fruity with black fruits scents. Some spicy notes of cinnamon and pepper. The wine is persistent, tart finish with beautiful tannins.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Smoke and sandalwood offset penetrating cassis and violet in this ripe, luscious red. While boldly concentrated in red-cherry and raspberry flavors, it's nuanced by layers of truffles, spice and earth. Soft, supple tannins are welcoming already but the wine will approach peak around 2028 and hold well through the next decade.
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Jasper Morris
90% comes from Les Echezeaux du Dessus and 10% from Quartiers de Nuits. The first part of the elevage was almost entirely in new wood, now reduced to 50% for the second winter, and still in barrel. Ripe, very dark fruit, lacks a little precision. This is a bit on the heavy side for my taste. Still, there is good length and intensity at the finish. When it settles down it will be a good wine.
Barrel Sample: 92-94 -
Wine & Spirits
Most of this wine comes from a parcel of vines planted in 1922, with a second parcel, planted in 1945, providing the balance (20 percent of the lot). The fruit was partially destemmed, with some whole clusters included in the pre-fermentation cold soak. Aged for 18 months in French oak barrels (85 percent new), the wine has dark concentration that cloaks its brighter tones of raspberries in earthy depths of trumpet mushrooms and cigar tobacco. It has the stamina to age for a decade or more, and a gentle grandeur that's already apparent.
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Wine Spectator
This red is dense and unyielding for now, with plenty of black cherry, black currant and blackberry fruit wrapped in a firm grip of tannins. Violet and stony accents add detail as this unwinds leisurely on the long finish. Best from 2024 through 2043.
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.