DRC Grands Echezeaux Grand Cru 2022

With a more textured and intense character than Échézeaux, Grands-Échézeaux presents a rich, almost rustic profile. The wine offers a concentrated palate of dark fruits, with gamey nuances and bramble hints, wrapped in a structured yet velvety texture. It's a wine of depth and character, often described as having a "monastic" quality. It's “Grands” before being Échézeaux. It's a country gentleman, aristocrat and dreamer.

96 Points - Wine Spectator

The remaining reds all possessed plenty of tannic structure for support and the ability to develop over time. The Grands-Echézeaux is even more generous than the Echézeaux, open and succulent, displaying cherry, raspberry and blood orange flavors and more tannins on the back end, suggesting more time to give.

94 Points - Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

The 2022 Grands Échézeaux Grand Cru was, by a small margin, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti's highest yielding red grand cru, at 43 hectoliters per hectare, a welcome change after tiny crops in recent vintages such as 2021 and 2016. Offering up lifted aromas of ripe red berries, orange zest and spices and framed by toasty new oak, it's full-bodied, ample and layered, with a firmer, more tightly wound profile than the more flamboyant Échézeaux, concluding with a youthfully chewy finish. If the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 2021 vintage was all about flowers and spices, the 2022s are all about fruit. These are rich, generous wines, for the most part very integrated out of the gates, and though they'll surely reward patience, they will not demand it. If one must find a recent analogy, it might be some sort of amalgam of 2018's ripeness and generosity of fruit with the more suave, transparent structure of 2017, but the comparison that came to mind as I tasted the wines was in fact with the domaine's 1964s. Harvest began with the red Corton plots on 30 August, finishing with Échézeaux and Corton-Charlemagne on 13 September. After the historically low yields of 2021, the vines bounced back, delivering a comparatively bountiful crop of between 37 and 43 hectoliters per hectare in Pinot Noir, with good levels of ripeness. Sorting now aims to eliminate desiccated and dehydrated berries, something that wasn't the case in the past, and the slow evolution toward shorter.