2021 Echézeaux Grand Cru

Mathilde Grivot beckons me to taste in their barrel cellar when I arrive at the winery in Vosne-Romanée, where they have set up a table and chair. It’s like old times before they built that comfy, warm new tasting room on the top floor. “At the end of March, it was maybe too warm, and all our old vines on the mid-slope started the growing cycle very quickly,” she tells me. “The frost was terrible as it devastated the old vines; for example, our Richebourg was reduced from five to two barrels. On average, it was 50% less volume than usual. For the second time since 2003, there is no Vosne-Romanée Reignots. We just had 40kg! We worked hard in the vineyard as it was very humid – rain every three or four days.” Joined by her father Étienne, “demoted” to fetching the samples from barrel, he explains: “We sprayed the vineyard just six times after a waning moon – intuition in our job is very important, adapting what we do in the context of what we sense.”

“It is the first difficult vintage for me like this,” continues Mathilde Grivot. “We started the picking on 23 September and harvested over five and half days, around half the usual time. It was important to do nothing as we had low quantities in the tank, which encourages you to do too much. But we were happy with the maturity of the grapes, and it was important not to extract any green sensations, so we did less pigeage, two or three maximum observing the colour, texture and aromas from the cap. All the cuvées are 100% de-stemmed and matured in 30% new oak. We won’t change our modus operandi and find the vintage is becoming more serious and dense, so we will rack just before Christmas, and the wines will stay two or three months in a tank before bottling.”

“For me, it was a normal vintage,” Etienne Grivot opines in a sanguine fashion. “In the past, we made good wines in difficult years. Forecasters are often wrong because they are too scientific, whereas we look at the sky, air humidity, and so on. I think it was important to harvest ripe and not to interfere during the vinification. I think many people like to go back to this kind of vintage. It is in the family of 2014 or 2017, and more and more like 2010 or 2012.”

I have been tasting at this address for around two decades now. As I have come to expect, this is a seriously impressive set of wines even without the context of a challenging season. However, they are not faultless, as in two or three cuvées such as the Chambolle-Musigny Combe d’Orveau. Elsewhere, these are vivacious wines that disguise the traumas of the growing season, particularly strong within their Premier Crus and not forgetting Grivot’s very capable Gamay.