With my son Sam about to leave London to go to University in California, I thought that it would be an interesting exercise to taste our way through some top mature Californian wines served blind alongside their French counterparts.
Today, we sounded the horns at Eugenie as we finished the harvest by picking some select rows of Clos de Vougeot that we had left for an experimental cuvee. The whole team went out to pick, including Michel, and we finished collecting the grapes in half an hour. For this special cuvee, we did not sort the grapes at all, but merely place them carefully into cases to be transported back to the chai, in whole bunches.
Day three at Eugenie was the day when the majority of the picking was finished. I started again in the vines, picking some Vosne Romane Les Brulées. The section we were picking today is called the “Brulées Bas” by the winemakers at the Domaine. In part, it’s because it is lower down the slope. It also takes on the meaning that the grapes produced don’t tend to reach the heights of their “Hautes Brulées”. The Brulées Bas vines were planted during the 60s when volume had become more important, so these vines, while prolific, don’t focus as highly on quality. The Domaine have therefore taken the difficult decision to declassify this part, and turn it into their Village Vosne Romanée. Given that this is 60% of the Brulées that they own, it is a significant decision for their costs, but it results in their Premier Cru Brulées being of a much higher quality.
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.
Over the next two weeks I will be working and reporting from Domaine d’Eugenie, the Burgundy Domaine found right in the heart of Vosne-Romanee (you can see La Tache from my room…). Run by Michel Mallard as part of the Artemis group which also owns Chateau Latour, Chateau Grillet in the Rhone, and Araujo in California, this relatively young Domaine has been producing very high quality wines since 2007.
