2011 Grands Echezeaux

The 2011 Grands-Echezeaux is another wine with terrific energy and focus. Cloves, new leather, spices, tobacco and smoke all flesh out in a rich, voluptuous wine bursting at the seams with immediacy and intensity. Dried flower and violets add nuance on the finish. This is another typical Bernard Gros wine with the fruit front and center.

Discreet but not invisible wood toast frames appealingly spicy, restrained and beautifully complex aromas of mostly dark berry liqueur with a top note of kirsch. There is excellent volume to the rich and seductively textured large-scaled flavors that possess good energy and precision on the mouth coating finish where the wood treatment resurfaces. This is really quite good if not truly stunning. Tasted: Jan 15, 2014. Drink: 2021+

Tasted blind at the Burgundy 2011 horizontal tasting in Beaune. There is a touch of reduction on the nose of Bernard Gros’s Grands Echezeaux 2011: subtle scents of blackcurrant leaf and raspberry, briary, juniper and then more pastilles notes as it opens up. The palate is medium-bodied with touches of oak coming through on the entry (coffee and dark chocolate) with the finish a little overworked. There is lot of punchy oak here and I wonder if there is sufficient fruit for it to pull through. A guilty pleasure! Nov 2014, www.robertparker.com