The Grand in Grands Échézeaux

The names invite confusion, and the vineyards themselves sort it out. Échézeaux is vast — more than thirty hectares sprawling uphill in Flagey-Échézeaux — and its wines can range from ethereal to merely pleasant depending on where in the sprawl they grew. Grands Échézeaux is the compact rectangle at the bottom of the slope, pressed directly against the wall of Clos de Vougeot, nine hectares of deeper, calmer soil. Smaller name on the map, bigger wine in the glass — that has been the received wisdom for a century, and the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s holdings in both make the comparison unusually clean.

The domaine farms about three and a half hectares here, and the wine consistently sits a full step above its sibling in density and reach: darker fruit, more muscle, a longer arc. In the domaine’s own range it plays the structural counterweight — without the aromatic exoticism of Romanée-Saint-Vivant or the sweep of La Tâche, but with a foursquare power neither of them attempts.

2014, the Balanced Year

The 2014 growing season was temperate where 2013 had been chaotic and 2015 would be hot — a year that asked little and gave precision in return. The domaine picked this vineyard on 23 and 24 September at modest yields, and the resulting wine carries the vintage’s signature: red rather than black fruit, a saline mineral seam, and structure without excess weight. Raspberry and crushed strawberry over something like crushed limestone; a grippy, medium-bodied palate that fans out slowly instead of flooding the mouth.

At six years old — which is when this bottle was opened — all of that reads as promise under tension. Grands Échézeaux is famously the domaine’s slowest wine after the two great monopoles, and the 2014’s chiseled finish made no secret of wanting another decade. Opening it this early is a legitimate choice; it just means you are tasting architecture rather than furniture.

A Long Counter

The bottle anchored a long evening at a teppan counter that had opened with Dom Pérignon Œnothèque 1985 and an Aubert Chardonnay, moved through a Nuits-Saint-Georges premier cru, and would continue into Napa — Merryvale, Viader, a Clos du Val from 1999. A transcontinental lineup with this wine at its centre of gravity.

Six years is early. But there is something to be said for meeting a wine like this before it is ready — you see the frame before the picture is painted, and with Grands Échézeaux the frame is the point.