Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Tasted blind at the Burgundy 2011 horizontal tasting in Beaune. The Richebourg 2011 from Etienne Grivot has a splendid bouquet with ripe, delineated raspberry, wild strawberry and red plum scents that are suffused with fine minerality. This just gets more and more complex in the glass. The palate is well balanced with fine tannins, crisp acidity and vibrant raspberry and cranberry fruit. It is nicely structured, which at the moment lends it a more masculine personality, but everything here is in its right place and there is precision all the way to the precise and tensile finish. Which 2011 Burgundy got the highest average score out of 250 tasted blind? This one.
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Decanter
The 2011 Richebourg from Domaine Jean Grivot was the only wine in the line-up that showed subtle nuances of herbaceousness on the nose, though its palate exuded a bit more fruit and tertiary notes to keep the subtle leafiness in check. Quite refined with a limestone-driven structure, it revealed aromas of red cherries, red currants and pink grapefruit, as well as some appealing forest floor and celery seed. It finishes on fine, chalky tannins and an overall poised persona."
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Jasper Morris
Mid red with some signs of evolution. I remember Etienne serving this once when there was still a noticeable green edge and he talked about the ‘nobility of the vegetal’. Now, all has come together, on the bouquet, but there are still vestiges on the palate. This will depend on your tolerance. I do enjoy the elegance and especially the persistence.
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.