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94-96 NM.
"The 2013 Echézeaux Grand Cru is matured in 100% new oak. The nose is dark and broody, but very well defined and unfurls with hints of iodine and seaweed. The new wood is clearly well integrated and allows the terroir to shine through. The palate is vivacious and bounds along with energy that permeates through the blackberry, boysenberry, mineral and crushed violets notes, then with aeration, along comes a note of kirsch. This is well structured and contains so much energy on the finish that it might well turn out to be Emmanuel’s best contribution to the 2013 vintage. I arrived at Domaine Emmanuel Rouget with a floodlit mobile bottling machine on the back of truck being packed up for the day, Emmanuel himself busy on the forklift. Fortunately it was not the 2013s that they were bottling, but even so, the monstrously late malolactics meant that some cuvées such as the Savigny-les-Beaune were not possible to taste. Even the Cros Parantoux had only completed part of its malolactic fermentation and Emmanuel seemed a little concerned about just how long it was taking. (He cited the 2008 as one that took 15 months to complete and he now regrets that it was so prolonged.) Still, what I could taste from barrel already looks very promising, building on the success of last year’s exemplary 2012s. He suffered the same as everyone else with respect to flowering that depleted the crop but of course, he was not touched by hail. He commenced the picking on October 1, perhaps a little earlier than some of his peers and so he was getting natural alcohol levels around 11 percent, therefore he had to chaptalize by around one degree. I will not discuss the wines in too much detail here because of those tardy malolactics, suffice to say that I cannot wait to retaste them in completed form post-bottling." Neal Martin, Wine Advocate #216, Jan 2015 |