A rich, creamy-textured red with ripe-strawberry, chocolate, stone and hazelnut aromas and flavors. It’s full and layered with attractive fruit and lightly chewy yet polished tannins. Flavorful finish. Subtle, yet structured. Try after 2022.

Bouchard's evocatively named parcel is a monopoly holding that covers 3.9ha on sand and gravel soils in the heart of Beaune Grèves. Picked early but still pretty ripe, this has tobacco pouch and clove aromas from 20% whole bunches, layers of mulberry and raspberry fruit, aromatic 20% new wood and a backdrop of sinewy, granular tannins.

Revisited from bottle, the 2018 Beaune 1er Cru Les Grèves Vigne de l'Enfant Jesus is showing very well, unfurling in the glass with a brooding bouquet of dark berry fruit, ripe cherries, warm spices, baking chocolate and subtle soil tones. Medium to full-bodied, deep and muscular, it's rich and powerful, with ripe tannins and a voluminous core of fruit, concluding with a long, heady finish. When I tasted this wine from barrel, Bouchard's Frédéric Weber observed that analytically this 2018 is very similar indeed to the 1947 vintage of l'Enfant Jesus, and in its controlled but overt ripeness the analogy seems even more obvious from bottle.- WK

Intense and tightly wound, this red displays a laser beam of cherry and berry fruit, with an underlying mineral element and steely structure. It's concentrated and long, yet needs time to reveal all its facets. Best from 2023 through 2040. 150 cases imported. — BS

Discreetly mentholated, ripe and brooding aromas speak of poached plum, spice and plenty of freshly turned earth scents. The medium-bodied flavors possess good delineation and an attractive mouthfeel before terminating in a lingering, youthfully austere and mouth coating finish that is shaped by a firmly tannic spine. This slightly warm effort is a big and very serious Beaune that is going to require plenty of time to arrive at its full apogee. Worth checking out.