2023 Echézeaux Grand Cru

The most thought-provoking comment during my entire marathon of tastings came from Amélie Berthaut. One of her vineyard workers was born in Africa and when they were instructed to green harvest, he told Berthaut that he could not do it. It was sacrilegious. And when you think about it, here is a person that grew up in a country where people starve, unable to bring himself to cut away perfectly healthy fruit and leave it lying on the ground. In fact, Amélie tells me that he tried to find some way that the fruit could be used, but nothing could be found. Instead, he was tasked with cutting the grass whilst the rest of the team snipped away.

“It was a generous vintage. It was interesting,” Berthaut tells me. “It was a warm year, so vine growth was very fast, and we saw there were a lot of bunches from the beginning. It was the first time we have done a green harvest. That was difficult to do, but I have no regrets, and we still have almost full yields for most vineyards, between 40-50 hl/ha. If it had been a cool vintage, then this [quantity] would have been difficult to ripen. We picked quite early, the whites on August 30 and the reds on September 4 or 5, as acidity was already quite low. We prefer to keep this acidity and chaptalize a little. However, the lab analysis at the beginning of harvest for potential alcohol was sometimes wrong and we ended up with higher alcohol than predicted [possibly due to higher yeast conversion rates?]”

“The harvest was so long that we had to stop picking as tanks were almost full (this was before the extension of the vat-room that is clearly inspired by the new cuverie at Domaine des Lambrays, with its arched window looking out upon a cedar). Also, we only picked in the morning. We’ve never done so much sorting – if we saw botrytis on just one berry we would discard the entire bunch. Usually, we have some stems in the reds, but because of lack of space, I could only do that on the first day. There is less new oak in 2023 because of the higher volumes.”

This was another impressive array of wines from Berthaut and her husband, Nicolas Faure. Some of the Fixin Village cuvées were maybe a little too much in terms of sucrosity but that might be tempered by bottling. Her Fixin Premier Crus form the heart of the range and since they keep ex-domaine prices reasonable, they remain go-to wines whenever I spot them on a list. There are a couple of additional cuvées from Vosne-Romanée this year due to the higher volumes, not least a half-barrel from Aux Brûlées.