2014 Echézeaux Grand Cru

The young Amélie Berthaut, who worked stages at Rudd Estate in Napa Valley and at Crater Rim in Waipara, New Zealand in 2012 and 2013, made her first vintage at her father’s estate in Fixin (Domaine Berthaut) in 2013. Since then she has also inherited a portion of her mother’s vineyards in Vosne-Romanée (Domaine Gerbet), and beginning with the 2015s her estate, now encompassing 14 hectares of vines, will become Domaine Berthaut-Gerbet. She also offers several wines from Gevrey-Chambertin, all through metayage arrangements (she gives back a percentage of the bottles to the owners).

Berthaut is a confident winemaker at the tender age of 27. She carries out a pre-fermentation cold soak, then does one or to pumpovers at the beginning of the vinification and punches down the cap only in the latter part of the fermentation (her father used to do more pigeages at the beginning, she told me in December). She keeps her wines on their skins for a few day to a full week after the fermentations have finished, for a total cuvaison of 20 to 25 days. She uses no new oak for her Fixin; 20% to 30% for her larger cuvées, and a bit more for the smaller ones.

Berthaut described 2014 as “an interesting vintage: bigger and longer than the 2013s but less fruity, and probably good to age. ” Some cuvées were not chaptalized at all, but others were bumped up from 12. 5% potential alcohol to 13%. The wines finished their malos only in late summer as her cellar in Fixin remained quite cold during the spring; even in the summer, she told me, the temperature doesn't surpass 57 degrees F.