Ratings & Tasting Notes:

100 points — Wine Advocate (William Kelley, January 2019)
Kelley calls the 2016 a worthy successor to the profound 2015, with aromas of wild berries, violets, peony, dark chocolate, cinnamon and exotic spices. The palate is full-bodied, ample and satiny, with what he describes as an ineffable sense of completeness — searing concentration without weight, a vibrant and animating line of acidity, and a long, expansive finish closing on a judicious touch of mouthwatering bitterness. Wines like this, he writes, are the foundation of the domaine’s reputation.

99 points — Burghound (Allen Meadows, January 2019)
Meadows finds the nose in the young Romanée-Conti mode he characterises as standoffish, yielding smoky, floral-suffused plum, cassis, spiced tea and sandalwood only under aggressive swirling. The flavours are sleek and medium-weight-plus with a seductive mouthfeel and abundant minerality carrying into a long, beautifully balanced if youthfully austere close. He reads it as built to age, needing the better part of three decades to realise its potential, and — with the caveat that projections about all-time great Romanée-Conti vintages are fraught — names it his wine of the vintage.

98 points — Decanter (January 2019)
A touch paler in colour than the rest of the range. The aromatics are surprisingly expressive on first approach, raspberry and cherry singing out together before exotic oak spice and whole-bunch notes join in — an ethereal perfume held briefly before the plunge into red and blueberry fruit on a concentrated palate. Rich, yet not seemingly so, with a silky textural elegance bound by a seamless combination of fruit, subtle oak, texture and freshness. Drinking window 2030 to 2040.

98 points — Vinous (Neal Martin, February 2019)
Martin records the picking on 25 September at 24 hl/ha and gives the wine five or six minutes to open. He calls it a very subtle Romanée-Conti, more discreet than the 2016 La Tâche, but entrancing in its purity and grace, building aromatically to add red fruit to black alongside wild hedgerow and freshly tilled soil. The palate is medium-bodied with extremely precise, fine tannin, wild strawberry, cranberry and crushed limestone, silkier in texture than the La Tâche, with bay leaf and black pepper toward a sustained finish that gains depth and grip with air. 440 cases produced.

Cult Wines International Notes:

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti farms the most valuable vineyard land on earth from a modest cellar in Vosne-Romanée. The Romanée-Conti vineyard is a monopole of a little over 1.8 hectares, worked by monks in the Middle Ages, renamed La Romanée under the Croonembourg family, and given its present name after the Prince de Conti acquired it in 1760. The domaine took its modern shape in 1942, when Henri Leroy bought a half share alongside the de Villaine family. The vineyard’s exhausted pre-phylloxera vines were pulled up in 1945 and replanted, the first vintage from those plantings released in 1952. Farming is biodynamic and yields are among the lowest in Burgundy.

2016 is Burgundy’s survivor vintage. A catastrophic late-April frost swept the Côte d’Or, followed by a cold, wet spring and heavy mildew pressure, before a hot, dry summer from late June turned the season around and delivered fruit of unusual purity. The domaine picked its Romanée-Conti on 25 September at 24 hectolitres per hectare, and 440 cases were made. The wine is this vineyard in its discreet, slow-revealing register rather than its flamboyant one: wild berries, violets, peony, dark chocolate, cinnamon and exotic spice, full-bodied and satiny, with concentration that never reads as weight. Critics rated it at or near the top of the domaine’s range that year, and it will need the better part of three decades to show everything it holds.

Bottle Size:

750 mL

Storage History:

Always stored on its side in a climate-controlled cellar.

Condition:

Please note: The bottle shown is the exact bottle being sold.

Outstanding condition.

The individual bottle number has been deliberately masked in our photographs. Every DRC bottle carries a unique serial number, and published images of that number are routinely harvested by fraudsters — both to produce convincing counterfeits and to advertise wine which a fraudulent seller doesn’t possess. Masking this number also protects its eventual owner from similar fraud. The number is fully intact on the label and unobscured on the bottle itself. If requested, unmasked photos can be provided to the buyer after purchase and prior to shipping.