2018 Echézeaux Grand Cru

Visiting Domaine Dujac in the heart of Morey-Saint-Denis is always one that I look forward to, not only because of the quality of wines, but for the candid assessment of the growing season courtesy of Alec Seysses. This year, it was nice to see his father Jacques who passed through. I grabbed him for a couple of minutes to glean some information on Clos Saint-Denis - Vinous readers can expect an epic vertical in the future. Back to pressing matters and the 2018 vintage. "We picked the whites on 29/30 August and the reds 4/5 September, finishing 10 days later. It was special: a drawn out harvest. It’s the first time we have seen such spread in terms of ripeness. We had to keep stopping and starting. I think [this variegation] was because of localized thunderstorms, which means that average rainfall varied from one village to another. To give you an example, we picked Clos de la Roche at 13.4% and then picked some of the Vosne-Romanées at barely 13.0% around eight days later. There was mildew in Vosne but we didn’t really suffer from it, so I don’t think it’s that. Maybe it was uneven flowering? After a difficult vintage in the vineyards, we were pleased with the quality once we began picking. The yields are all over the place, the whites incredibly generous, near the legal limit for whites and reds. Everyone was calling each other, looking for spare barrels. We used 90% whole cluster on the domaine wines. The 2018 is a vintage where we would normally have used 100% but we found that the bunches at the top of the vat can become damaged, so we now de-stem a little. In terms of maceration, in 2018 we did less punch downs and more pumpovers. When I started in the early 2000s we might have done three in a day, but it's more a question of when you do it. My father is good at keeping data. We found that he had moved from late to early punchdowns. When we experimented with later punchdowns we found there was little difference between the two. The tannins are so ripe that you can easily go beyond what you need. The average alcohol is 13.5% and nothing is above 14%. This will be a vintage that will live in Burgundy folklore."