2014 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Grands Echezeaux Grand Cru

Ratings & Tasting Notes:

95 points — Burghound (Allen Meadows, January 2017)

The expressive nose is even spicier and more floral here, a lovely array of rose petal, lilac and lavender adding elegance to mostly dark Pinot and earth aromas trimmed in a subtle touch of wood. As is virtually always the case with this cru, the wine is bigger, richer, more powerful and more muscular, with excellent volume to the rich, mouth-coating flavours and superb length across a chiselled, robust and hugely long finale. Meadows is clear that patience will definitely be required.

94 points — Decanter (January 2017)

A very serious wine indeed in 2014, opening with an inviting bouquet of red cherry, cedary new oak, dark spice and incipient potpourri. Rich, sappy and intense on the palate, its ripe tannins beautifully enrobed in cool, crystalline fruit, with a lovely combination of power and grace. The reviewer expects considerable complexity to unfold with cellar time, and singles out the wine’s depth and the integration of its tannins as marking it out as a particular success in the vintage. Harvested on 23 and 24 September.

94 points — Wine Advocate (Neal Martin, February 2017)

Martin records the picking on 23 and 24 September at 32.5 hectolitres per hectare. Slightly deeper in colour than the 2014 Échezeaux, it is to his palate undeniably a tangible step up in intensity and complexity, offering disarming raspberry, crushed strawberry and crushed limestone that almost verges on flintiness, with beguiling purity and focus. The palate is medium-bodied with a noticeably grippy entry and a strong saline seam — structured, though not a dense Grands Échézeaux — fanning out gently on the finish with pretty, mineral-soaked red fruit. He notes the aftertaste is not as prolonged as in the greatest vintages he has tasted from this vineyard, but calls it a supremely gifted wine that will give two and possibly three decades of pleasure.

94+ points — Vinous (Stephen Tanzer, March 2017)

Bright medium red. At once more sombre and higher-pitched on the nose than the Échezeaux, offering black cherry, dark berries, violet and bitter chocolate. A step up in texture and richness, but densely packed and imploded on the day. At once powerful and cool, conveying terrific energy to flavours of dark fruit, salty minerality, liquorice and violet. A very long, powerful wine with a downright chewy texture and noteworthy finesse to its tannins, really glistening on the very long, rising finish. Tanzer’s advice: forget about it for a decade.

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 3.53 hectares sitting down-slope from its Échezeaux parcels. 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.

2014 tested Burgundy’s growers before rewarding them. A cool, uneven flowering, summer hail and pressure from spotted-wing drosophila made for an anxious season until a dry, breezy September restored the crop’s health, giving a vintage of freshness, tension and classical mid-weight proportions rather than opulence. The domaine picked its Grands Échézeaux on 23 and 24 September at 32.5 hectolitres per hectare. The wine shows red cherry, raspberry, crushed strawberry, black cherry and dark berries over rose petal, lilac, lavender, violet, cedary oak, dark spice, potpourri, bitter chocolate, liquorice and crushed limestone verging on flint. Bigger, richer and more muscular than its neighbour, with a chewy, mouth-coating texture, a strong saline seam and a grippy entry, it closes chiselled, robust and hugely long. Every reviewer makes the same point: this needs a decade in the cellar before it shows what it has.

Bottle Size:

750 mL

Storage History:

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

Condition:

Outstanding condition.

Please note: The condition of the bottle you will receive is accurately reflected by the one shown in the images.

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.