Not only are the wines of Lucien Le Moine consistently first-rate—this Burgundy ‘micro-négociant’ focuses solely on small lots from Premier and Grand Cru vineyards—but the story of the company is even better. Lucien Le Moine is not an actual person, but an invented name translating roughly to “the enlightened monk,” referencing co-founder Mounir Saouma’s lengthy winemaking tenure at a Trappist Monastery in his native Lebanon.
In 1999, Mounir and his wife, Rotem—herself a native of Israel who studied agriculture in Dijon—purchased an old, cold cellar in Beaune and worked what must have been an impressive Rolodex to source wines from the very best vineyards in the Côte d’Or. In any given vintage, the couple produce a dizzying array of wines, selecting them just after pressing from their grower-partners and ‘raising’ them in custom-crafted barrels of tight-grained oak from the Jupilles forest. Theirs is a fanatical, hands-on operation which, as they note themselves, will never grow larger than 100 barrels (~2,500 cases) in any vintage due to the constraints of space. As they explain on their website, “this is the way for us to be able to do everything ‘by hand’ and ‘by ourselves,’” and the results are consistently stunning: This 2014 Échezeaux Grand Cru is a typically sumptuous example and a characteristically rare one—so rare, in fact, that we can offer just 3 bottles per customer until it sells out. This is impeccable Grand Cru red Burgundy and I expect it to disappear quickly.
The iconic Échézeaux Grand Cru, at 40 hectares, is one of the largest Grand Cru sites in all of Burgundy. It is located just north of the village of Vosne-Romanée and is completely devoted to Pinot Noir (the largest landowner in Échézeaux, incidentally, is none other than Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, located 500 yards away). In all, there are about 80 different owners with a stake in this vineyard, which is known for some of the most elegant and profound Pinot Noirs in the Côte de Nuits. In 2014—a vintage we have praised up and down for its impeccable balance—the Saoumas hit one out of the park with their take on Échezeaux, which shows off a delicious (and characteristic) combination of fruit concentration and woodsy, underbrush-y savor.
The Saoumas are described as both exacting technicians and non-interventionists. Once they’ve selected a wine, it goes into barrel for malolactic fermentation, which often doesn’t commence until the summer following the vintage because the Le Moine cellars are so cold. The wines are aged for extended periods with 100% of their lees (the spent yeast cells left over from fermentation), and are never racked (decanted from one barrel to another, which both oxygenates wines and separates it from the lees) during this period. This style of elévage (aging) enables the Saoumas to keep sulfur use to an absolute minimum, and as such these wines always require decanting, to disperse trapped CO2 (which acts as an anti-oxidant/preservative instead of sulfur). It’s an interesting mix of the “modern”—always 100% new French oak barrels—and the “traditional,” and the results are impossible to argue with.
The 2014 Le Moine Échézeaux Grand Cru is a luxurious, exceptionally complex red that does proper justice to one of the world’s greatest Pinot Noir vineyards. In the glass, it displays a deep ruby core with garnet reflections at the rim, with slow-moving tears that show off its ample concentration. It explodes from the glass with aromas of black cherry, kirsch, raspberry, black tea, damp violets, exotic spices, vanilla, and crushed stones. It is a muscular young wine, perfectly constructed but ultimately in need of time to really blossom. After about an hour in a decanter, it was simply incredible, but the magic hour for this wine probably lay 7-10 years down the line. If you can’t keep your hands off it now, decant it about 60 minutes before serving in your best Burgundy stems. A fancy dinner is called for here: When you decide to unearth this from your cellar, pair it with your best effort in the kitchen. The attached recipe has both the French pedigree and the complementary flavors you need. Cheers!
