Domaine Dujac is young by Burgundy’s standards and has been counted among the region’s great estates for nearly as long as it has existed. Jacques Seysses, the son of a biscuit manufacturer, apprenticed under Gérard Potel at Domaine de la Pousse d’Or before buying the rundown 4.5-hectare Domaine Marcel Graillet in Morey-Saint-Denis at the end of 1967 and renaming it for himself: Dujac, as in du Jacques. The first bottling, the 1969, reached restaurant tables across France through his father’s connections, and his insistence on fermenting whole clusters became the house signature at a time when almost no one else beyond the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was leaving the stems in. His son Jeremy joined in 1998, followed by Jeremy’s wife Diana Snowden Seysses, a UC Davis-trained oenologist from a Napa winemaking family, in 2001, and his brother Alec in 2003. A purchase shared with the de Montille family in 2005 brought Chambertin, Romanée-Saint-Vivant, and two Vosne-Romanée premiers crus into the fold, and the domaine now farms 15.5 hectares, seven grands crus among them, organically and with biodynamic practices since the early 2000s.
Dujac’s Échezeaux comes from 0.69 hectares in Les Champs Traversins, one lieu-dit of a grand cru that sprawls across some 36 hectares and roughly eighty owners, on a southeast-facing slope near 280 meters where a thin reddish-brown soil sits over limestone and chert. The vines are about sixty years old, though Alec Seysses admits no one is certain, since the planting records have been lost. In the frost-shortened 2021 vintage, with harvest beginning on 24 September, about a third of the fruit was destemmed and the wine was aged in 70 percent new barrels. John Gilman gave it 94+ in View From the Cellar and wrote that it was singing when he tasted it.
Notes of raspberry and wild strawberry, mandarin peel, pressed rose, a hint of bonfire. The palate is harmonious and saline, taut and fresh, with a brightness at the finish and more muscle underneath than the vintage’s reputation would suggest. Drink 2027 through 2048.
