2004 Echézeaux Grand Cru

"Two thousand five was a year to put a lot of lees in the barrel," summarized Mounir Saouma. "The wines needed the polysaccharides from the lees to balance their strong tannins. It was a year not to rack and not to sulfur. It was a year to age the wines with a lot of oxygenating lees so that the wines could open by themselves." Still, Saouma stirred the lees monthly until the end of the malolactic fermentations. Saouma always makes a point to offer at least two different crus from favored villages-in white as well as red-and he told me that he would much rather his customers taste his wines from Vosne-Romanee side by side, for example, than for them to compare his Bonnes-Mares to another producer's Bonnes-Mares in a competitive tasting. After all, his ultimate objective is simple: "To produce typical wines, without defects, that showcase their sites." To that end, he uses only barrels made from tight-grained Jupilles oak (from a forest between the Loire Valley and Normandy), which he considers to be "neutral." Of course, the Lucien Le Moine wines tend to drip early sex appeal owing to their sheer sweetness, so I would not bet against them in blind tastings. These 2005s, though, have been evolving slowly in barrel and appear to be structured for long life in bottle.

"Two thousand four was a year not to have a calendar," said Mounir Saouma. "It was necessary to treat the vines when the vines needed it. It was necessary to reduce the crop again in early September. "Saouma took no steps to clean up the lees in the barrels of 2004 wine he purchased, and is aging the wines in all new barrels. "We had very high malic acidity in 2004, the highest since I came to Burgundy," he told me. "But the acids fell with the malolactic fermentation, and the wines became sweet. They have textbook typicity. "The malos were finished when I tasted in November, but only a few barrels had been racked. These 2004s look to be stunning; if I had any concern about this crop of wines, it's that they were almost too succulent 14 months after the harvest.