Ratings & Tasting Notes:

97 points — Jasper Morris (Inside Burgundy, November 2020)
The purple colour is even more concentrated than the Échezeaux alongside. Heady, densely wound fruit with greater suppleness and more flesh on the bones, sumptuous dense black fruit notes brought back to base camp by the freshness of the finish. Morris notes the lightest dusting of cocoa powder, less evident on the Échezeaux, and finds the pinpoint pricks of fresh mineral acidity do the wine a world of good. His verdict: perfect harmony.

96 points — Decanter (October 2019)
Showing more tannin and backbone than the domaine’s Échezeaux bottling, as tends to be the case. The fruit comes from vines between seventy and ninety years old, which benefited in 2018 from cooler, more moisture-retentive soils. Intensely spicy, with clove and tobacco pouch aromas, impressive texture and weight, refreshing supporting acidity and a great deal of underlying concentration.

95 points — Burghound (Allen Meadows, January 2021)
A touch of oak toast surrounds notably ripe but markedly restrained aromas of black cherry liqueur, violet, lavender, exotic tea and sandalwood. The rich, full-bodied and muscular flavours brim with sappy dry extract and a seductive mouthfeel before culminating in a hugely long finish. Meadows calls it a big, bold and robust effort that should develop gradually over the next twenty-five to thirty years, and rates this contrast of power and refinement as potentially one of the greatest Grands Échézeaux the domaine has produced this century — though he expects the 2019 to be a worthy rival.

94 points — Wine Advocate (William Kelley, November 2022)
A rich, muscular wine, unfurling in the glass with cherries, sweet berries, red fruit compote and plums mingled with subtle exotic spices and peonies. Full-bodied, fleshy and broad-shouldered, with an ample core of fruit, powdery tannins, ripe acids and a long, heady finish. Kelley is candid that out of the gates the 2018 is something of a fruit bomb, but expects it to metabolise that puppy fat with time and become something special.

Cult Wines International Notes:

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti farms its holdings from Vosne-Romanée under long-established biodynamic practice, at yields among the lowest in Burgundy. Grands Échézeaux lies in Flagey-Échezeaux, hard against the wall of the Clos de Vougeot, and the domaine is its largest owner with roughly three and a half of the climat’s nine hectares. It has always been the more serious of the two Échezeaux crus — denser, more structured and longer-lived than its larger neighbour — and it remains the clearest and most affordable route into the domaine’s house style.

2018 was Burgundy’s hot and generous vintage: a wet spring followed by a long, dry, sunny summer that delivered one of the largest crops in decades alongside unusually high ripeness. Grands Échézeaux came through it better than many sites, its cooler, more moisture-retentive soils and vines of seventy to ninety years buffering the heat. The wine is rich and muscular — cherries, sweet berries, red fruit compote and plums alongside black cherry liqueur, violet, lavender, exotic tea, sandalwood, clove and tobacco pouch, with a touch of oak toast. Full-bodied, fleshy and broad-shouldered, it brims with sappy dry extract and carries powdery tannins, ripe acids and a hugely long finish lifted by fresh mineral acidity. Critics read its youth differently, but agree on the trajectory — one places it among the finest Grands Échézeaux the domaine has made this century, developing over twenty-five to thirty years.

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.