An elegant, ripe and relatively airy nose fuses notes of spice and dried flowers with those of essence of red currant, cherry and a hint of wood. I very much like the mouthfeel of the strikingly complex middle weight plus flavors that flash evident minerality on the beautifully persistent and well-balanced finale. This seductive yet serious Ech should be excellent in time.

Score: 93 Allen Meadow (AM), Bourghound (BH), January 2019

The 2016 Echézeaux Grand Cru comes from Les Rouges du Bas and contains a 100% whole bunch. It has a lucid ruby colour. A little muted at first, it opens with dark cherry, orange blossom and raspberry preserve scents, a hint of vanilla pod in the background. The palate is ripe and sappy on the entry with superb definition, a little spice towards the finish, an Echézeaux with what feels like natural flow. Superb.

Score: 94 Neal Martin (NM), Vinous Media (VM), July 2018

Lachaux lost half of his crop in this vineyard to frost, but the 2016 Echezeaux Grand Cru is superb, offering up a deep bouquet of wild berries, orange rind and mossy soil. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, deep and expansive, with a firm, tight-knit core, excellent concentration and a rich chassis of structuring tannin, underpinned by vibrant acids. This will need and reward time, but it´s one of the finest renditions of this site to date from Charles Lachaux.

Thoughtful, intelligent and increasingly self-assured, Charles Lachaux seems to gain in authority each time I taste with him. We are exact contemporaries, so I look forward to following his evolution over many years to come, but what he has achieved in so short a time is already impressive. In the cuverie, wines that were once heavily extracted and lavishly oaked are now gently macerated, with significant percentages of whole clusters, and matured in mostly used barrels. In the vineyard, where Lachaux is frequently to be found—and as someone who drives along the Côte d´Or hundreds of times a year, I can attest to that first hand—the evolution has been just as dramatic. The vines canopies are now rolled, emulating the practice of Domaine Leroy, and a new parcel in Aux Reignots has been planted at a density of fully 20,000 vines per hectare. The guiding principle, if I have understood it correctly, is to achieve a concentration in the vineyard to permit the most gentle of extraction in the cuverie, the goal being, wines with mature, satiny tannins and ineffable natural harmony. Every vintage seems to bring Lachaux one step closer to realizing his objective, to paraphrase the words of his leading inspiration, Lalou Bize-Leroy, he might legitimately be content, albeit never satisfied, with the results of all his efforts. This is an immensely promising domaine, with one of the brightest futures ahead of any in Burgundy, and readers should start paying attention.

Score: 95 William Kelley (WK), The Wine Advocate (WA), January 2019