1990 henri jayer, echezeaux grand cru

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Why We're Buying

Henri Jayer's revolutionary approach to winemaking made him a titan in the industry. It also explains why wines like Henri Jayer Échézeaux Grand Cru cost the same as a used car. The pinot noir has an unmistakable opulence with ultra-fine tannins and persistent energy. The bouquet falls in line with the house style, melding red berries, crushed stones, coffee, and perfume. Jayer is known for never producing more than 3,500 bottles of a wine, so investment opportunities for this pinot noir are scarce.

Critics Scores

Burghound

Knock out aromas of kirsch, blackberry extract and ripe earth lead to big, robust, quite structured, deep and sappy flavors of incredible depth and complexity and as grand as those characteristics are, it is the simply mindbending length that really sets this apart from the average Jayer Ech. A wine that should last for 25 years if well stored.

John Gilman

The 1990 Jayer Echézeaux is still quite closed, but it is a wine with so much blazing purity of fruit that no amount of cloud cover can fully obscure its sunlight. The bouquet is deep and vibrantly intense, offering up scents of roasted plums, pure black cherries, venison, dark chocolate, emerging notes of bonfires, intense terroir, coco-cola, and just a whisper of vanillin oak. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, with a thick wave of pure fruit on the attack, a rock solid core, and a majestic long and profound finish. I have never tasted a Jayer Echézeaux with this level of intensity, and yet the wine remains pristine, elegant and totally harmonious. Much like a great chef’s best reduction sauce, the ’90 Jayer is the essence of Echézeaux, with seemingly a magnum’s worth of wine crammed into every bottle. The tannins are ripe and totally covered by the onslaught of fruit here, but should prove to carry the wine easily thirty plus years. This is a magical wine. (Drink between 2007-2035)

Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

Tasted at the evening dinner in Southwold. This rare Burgundy has a very refined bouquet that is shifting towards secondary aromas of oyster shell, thyme and Girolles over the patina of crystalline red fruit. It is simply beautifully focused. The palate is very well balanced with nigh perfect acidity, a core of sweetness that is fading with time, a tang of orange zest and quince towards the deft finish. But there is a slight cheesy note towards the finish and in the glass, it does not hold up as well as Engel’s Grands Echezeaux ’93 served alongside and after 20 minutes there is a strong molasses note on the finish and the nose has become diffuse. Drink up! Tasted January 2012. (NM)