2007 Echézeaux Grand Cru

This estate has moved into a spacious new facility in Vosne-Romanee, close to its vine holdings. The 2007s and 2008s were racked only for the assemblage prior to the bottling. Incidentally, Domaine d'Eugenie exchanged its old Maizieres village holding with the Bichots for the land around the new winery, which they will call Clos d'Eugenie. Although these vines, located just below La Tache, were never bottled separately by the Bichots, Domaine d'Eugenie director Frederic Engerer (who is also estate manager of Chateau Latour) considers the parcel to be very promising. Along with the Brulees, it was farmed organically beginning in 2009, and it was also vinified separately in '09, with the hope that it would be bottled on its own as well.

Francois Pinault, who also owns Chateau Latour, purchased what was formerly Domaine Rene Engel before the harvest of 2006 but it was not until 2007 that the new team was able to work the vines and make the wines. Pinault installed Frederic Engerer, the perfectionist estate manager at Latour and a not-so-secret Burgundy lover for many years, and Engerer brought in the local Michel Mallard as technical director. I tasted the 2006s from barrel in November of '07 and found them to be rather hard-edged, with the exception of the Grands-Echezeaux; the finished wines are intense, muscular and austere, with somewhat rigid textures that strike me as more Bordeaux than Burgundy. Two thousand seven gives a much better idea of the new team's talents. The crop level was kept low, and the estate-wide production was less than 29 hectoliters per hectare. The harvest took place between September 4 and 9; Engerer noted that the sugars went up early but that real phenolic maturity only arrived at the end. Engerer, always candid about what he could have done differently, told me that the percentage of new oak is a bit higher than he would have liked (the grand crus are aging in "all new barrels minus one"), as he and Mallard overestimated the size of the crop and thus purchased too many new barrels. And he's also eager to move to the new winemaking facility being built in Vosne-Romanee; the first three vintages were made in the large Lupe-Cholet cellar in Nuits-Saint-Georges. I found the 2007s here to be very promising and was fascinated by the Clos Vougeot, half of which was vinified with whole clusters.