Winemaker Notes
The color is feminine; the nose, masculine. The mouth is full of life with an incomparable richness, a generosity which is sometimes overwhelming. To the eye, everything depends on the vintage and the age of the bottle. A Richebourg can be a velvety ruby color or a dark nocturnal red, shading towards blackish-purple. The color is always intense and dense, luminous, and shot through with gleams of carmine. When young, this wine reveals aromas of musk and Russian leather with touches of sandalwood. With age, it acquires scents of hawthorn and peach blossom. Two aromatic families can be distinguished: hints of lichen, woodland undergrowth, and mushrooms on the one hand; on the other, the scent of cherries, black currants, and cooked or preserved fruits. When young, this wine positively explodes in the mouth, intense and violent. It needs to be allowed to age for several years, in the course of which it will become expansive and warm. Elegant and racy, it is capable of a long life, and wines from the great vintages are superb, the very image of sensuous pleasure. They occasionally have more finesse than structure, but may conversely be massively fruity and enthusiastic, compact and muscular in temperament.
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.