1997 Echézeaux Grand Cru

Grivot picked about half of his '98 crop before the rain on Saturday the 26th, then added more pickers to bring in the rest before there was significant dilution. Still, the harvest required lots of triage by the harvesters in the vines (workers had also made a previous pass through the vines at the end of August and beginning of September to remove pink grapes and pull leaves). "We needed to pick the entire crop in eight days," says Grivot, "so using a table de trie would have been too slow." The malos ended in August and September, and the wines had not yet been racked or sulfited in November. (The plan was to rack in December or January and assemble the wines for bottling in April.) Grivot was relying more on carbonic gas than on SO2 to protect the wines from oxidation. Grape sugars were in the healthy 11.8% to 12.5% range in '98 ("I'm happy when I get 11.5% in Vosne-Romanee," noted Grivot, adding that since 1987 he been more concerned about low acidity levels than adequate sugars), and pHs were a bit lower than those of the previous vintage. Yields in both '98 and '97 were in the 35 to 40 hectoliters-per-hectare range.

Etienne Grivot was among the earliest harvesters in Vosne Romanee in '97; his intent was to avoid getting fruit with aromas of surmaturite. "This was a vintage of great ripeness," Grivot explains. "The late pickers risked losing freshness and getting baroque, port like aromas of confiture and pruneaux. There are really two very different schools in '97." Grivot felt that the lighter tannic structure of '97 did not justify a long elevage on the contrary, he vinified his wines to have early appeal. Grivot did not chill his musts in order to do a maceration a froid because he wanted to work with low levels of SO2 ("in a year like '97, sulfur inevitably dries the wines"). Total cuvaison time was thus a bit shorter than normal. The malos took place earlier than usual, and the wines were racked last July. In November, Grivot planned to bottle in January and February, or about three months earlier than he bottled his '96s. "The '97s will be unctuous, charming, sensual wines perfect for the market," he predicts. "But they will always be more marked by the vintage than by the terroir."