1998 Echézeaux Grand Cru

Etienne Grivot was in the midst of racking his '99s when I stopped by for a visit in November. Even though half of the wines still had some unconverted malic acidity, probably due to their substantial acids and tannins, they needed aeration, he explained. ("Showing you my wines with some malic acidity, or just racked, is like presenting my children not dressed properly, or unclean," he told me.) And the racking will speed up the end of the malos, he said, adding that such excellent vintages as 1990, '93, '95 and '96 were also characterized by protracted secondary fermentations. Grivot describes 1999 as "a vintage of great harmony, serious even at the level of the village wines. The wines should be indestructible, though not quite as indestructible as the '96s." Grivot harvested on the late side, picking a good deal of his crop after the rains of September 24 and 25. But at least some water was needed to invigorate the vines, he noted. "Yes, there was some loss of concentration in the late-picked fruit, but the grapes also gained in skin maturity in the last several days. The rain really arrived too late, but it was better than no rain at all." Yields were very generous, and following a strict selection Grivot made about 50 hectoliters per hectare. A number of the cuvees were concentrated via saignee of 6% to 8%. Needless to say, my notes on wines that had not finished their malolactic fermentations must be taken as provisional in nature.

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.