Flagey-Echezeaux. The wines of Flagey would be more popular than they are and perhaps as celebrated as they deserve, if they were not, to the average Anglo-Saxon, so nearly unpronounceable. Echezeaux, as a word, is certainly quite a mouthful, but it is also quite a mouthful as a wine, and well worth the trouble. The wines of ten vineyards, comprising nearly a hundred acres in all, go to market as Echezeaux, and quality-wise the name is one of the most dependable in Burgundy. Grands Echezeaux, the town's best vineyard, is separated from Clos de Vougeot only by a wall, an fully deserves the same exalted rank.
The Domaine de la Romanee Conti includes holdings in both Echezeaux and Grands Echezeaux, and bottles both wines under the Domaine label. As might be expected, they are impeccable.
***Grands Echezeaux (23)
**Echezeaux (in toto, 98)
Vosne-Romanée. Vosne (which rhymes with bone, for the s is silent) has been called “the middle pearl of the Burgundian necklace.” The average quality of its wines (there are some 425 acres planted to Pinot Noir) is probably higher than that of any other village of the Côte d'Or, and it includes what is certainly the most valuable plot of agricultural land in the world. This, peerless Romanée Conti, was bought in 1868 by the grandfather of the present owners for 330,000 gold francs, or ＄56,000 for five acres; it is worth much more today.
According to both custom and law, the wines of Echezeaux and Grands Echezeaux can be sold as Vosne-Romanée, their character being much the same, and the same producers, in many cases, owning vines in both communes, often only a few feet apart.
Of all the inner circle of great Burgundies, the wines of Vosne-Romanée are the most difficult to describe—an perhaps because they seem never to go to extremes but remain instead the archetype of Burgundy itself. Softer and less forthright than Chambertin, fuller than Musigny, richer than Vougeot, they have at their best an almost total absence of faults. But they have their positive virtues, too.
All of Romanée-Conti, all of La Romanée, all of La Tâche, plus considerable portions of Richebourg, Grands Echezeaux, and Echezeaux, now form part of a single property, the Domaine de la Romanee Conti, which estate-bottles everything it sells—consistently and deservedly for the highest prices brought by any re wines in the world. There are those who will tell you that these owe their unmistakable character and their prodigious quality to some secret of vinification, but I have visited the cellar, I suppose, twenty times, and I have never seen anything except goo grapes, old-fashioned methods, an magnificent wines.
Until 1946, Romanée-Conti, like part of Richebourg, was still plante with the old, ungrafted French vines and was cultivated exclusively by hand. These Vieilles Vignes Françaises were torn up after the 1945 vintage, and there will be no more Romanee-Conti of the old quality for at least a dozen or fifteen years.
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