Walking the short distance to the Domaine each morning really gives a sense of the Grand Crus in Vosne Romanee. La Tache, Romanée Conti, La Grande Rue - they are all knitted together in a space that would make up less than a tenth of the vineyards of some Bordeaux Chateaux. Today, we are working on both Grands Echezeaux and Echezeaux. The Domaine has only half a hectare of the two vineyards, so it takes less than half a day to pick each Grand Cru.
Picking Echezeaux in the sunshine
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I start in the vineyards again, harvesting Grands Echezeaux that amazingly looks even better than the Clos de Vougeot picked yesterday. Large bunches of this temperamental grape - uniform in colour, size, and maturity - are amazing to see. After half an hour or so, I return to the chai to focus on sorting. Domaine d’Eugenie has a draconian selection process, to make sure that the fruit that goes into their wine can only be the best. The first selection takes place in the vineyards, where any signs of raisining or rot (not that you see much this year) are removed. On returning to the Domaine, the grapes pass through a vibrating table to remove any dry/dead or small matter. After that, a team of four to six (including me, today), check all the bunches for anything unwanted, before Michel and the other winemakers run a final check, and take the sorted grapess to the vats to begin a cold maceration.
Analysing the grapes
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This year, thanks to the quality, there has been more whole-bunch pressing. The juice from both these, and the destemmed cuvées, look (and taste!) absolutely fantastic. There is ripeness, acidity and depth of fruit all well in balance. The quality of fruit seems to be as good as there has been in the last five years at the Domaine. It is so clean that the experiment is to ferment the Grands Echezeaux without using sulphur until converting to barrels at the earliest. This shows a real confidence in the quality of the fruit. Of course this is very early days and we don’t know quite how these grapes will turn into wine, but the early signs are very, very promising for a very good vintage. The only issue is volume. Due to the dry growing season, the grapes are ripe, but small, yielding a small volume of high quality juice. So don’t expect a flood of 2015 in the market, but what there will be looks to be well worth buying.
In the afternoon, as we moved onto the Echezeaux, the yields continued to be small but again of the highest quality. After transferring to the vats we take several readings, and when compared to the recent history of Eugenie, the analysis draws the closest comparisons to 2010 and 2012. After taking all the necessary readings, we cover the vats with dry ice to keep the temperatures low for maturation, and leave them overnight. The Clos de Vougeot that we picked yesterday needs pumping over to aid aeration and fermentation, which is an important process to refresh and break up the cap of grape skins and other solid grape matter that forms at the top of the vat. These samples are already showing incredibly well, and the colour difference between the destemmed and whole bunch vats is already showing.
The entrance to the winery at Eugenie
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Once again we finished the day with a blind sample showcasing an older vintage from the Domaine. On both nosing and tasting the wine, I was quite sure, given the youthful character and ripe, round qualities with balanced acidity, that this would be a 2012. This was a consensus among most of those tasting, but it was in fact a 2011 Echezeaux. I was very impressed. The ripeness and length to the fruit is unlike most wines from Burgundy I have tasted in this vintage. The oak is well integrated, and there is a sweet floral character that really lifts the palate. It was a very impressive glass of wine, made all the more so as we drank it outside among the Clos d’Eugenie vines, looking out to the sun setting over La Tache. I could get used to this life…
Sunset at Eugenie (with La Tache behind)
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