2023 Echézeaux Grand Cru

Baby Grivot did not join us for the tasting this year. After the newborn attended his first tasting with yours truly 12 months ago, Mummy Grivot (Mathilde) told me how he is already walking about and causing trouble, as inquisitive tots are wont to do. Grandad Grivot (Etienne) was on an epicurean tour of Spain, hopefully avoiding the fatal storms sweeping across the country—difficult to imagine with the cloudless sky outside.

“After a succession of small vintages, we had to adapt to a larger crop,” Mathilde explains. “We did a green harvest in August. Two weeks after, I saw that bunches were getting bigger and bigger. I did not want more juice—I needed more concentration. Nature was too generous. The vines were compensating. So, we stopped the green harvest and decided to wait for maturity and eliminate excess fruit on the sorting line. Normally, it is better to do a green harvest, but when we saw the reaction of the vines, especially with higher yielding clones like SO4, we realized it would be a mistake. It was complicated for the sorters as they have been with us for a long time, so they had to get used to a different instruction to say, in 2021, in terms of what to sort out.”

“We started on September 12 in Les Beaux Monts and Les Boudots. At the end of the day, I checked the yields of the two cuvées, and I was worried about what subsequent cuvées would yield. We eliminated about 12% on the sorting line, and one vineyard we eliminated 21% (Nuits Saint-Georges Les Charmois). We look for complexity and finesse. So, in 2023, yields are 5% less than the legal maximum, without any saignée, as we had the right proportion of skin to juice in the tank. Everything is destemmed as usual, with 30% new oak across the range.”

Overall, I find Grivot’s 2023s even better than their 2022s, with maybe more consistency, save for a couple of cuvées that were unable to disguise some overripeness. Having tasted here for many years, I can’t remember a vintage with such livewire Pinoté, transparency and tension, clearly less concentrated than the 2022s but imbued with more finesse. The Richebourg was obdurate and closed, whereas the previous day, Mathilde told me it had been open and lively. “It knew that a journalist would be coming,” she says.