Our Provenance Guarantee
Purchase with confidence. All of our wines are selectively sourced and thoroughly inspected for authenticity and signs of poor storage. Accepted bottles are preserved in our climate-controlled cellar until they reach your doorstep. We have no storefront and no walk-in traffic, so nothing is moved or handled between inspection and shipping.
The bottle you see photographed is the bottle you receive (or fundamentally identical when multiple bottles are listed), and our commitment to you is that it arrives as represented. If it doesn’t, we want to hear from you.
Tasting Notes:
98 points Wine Advocate
A deep ruby colour with very little ageing. There is a tangible stalkiness on the nose that seems to dissipate with a few swirls of the glass. The nose is reticent at first, dark cherries, blackberry leaf, a touch of dried blood and cooked meats with blueberries and violets evolving after twenty minutes in the glass. The palate has beautiful poise, firm tannins and moving towards secondary flavours: sour cherry, dried orange peel, and a ferrous finish. I feel this La Tache is undergoing its adolescence, an “awkwardness” that will resolve itself five or six years hence. “A moody git” are the last three words I scribbled as I vainly tried to extract it out of its sulk, but I give up. Just cellar it because it will deliver! Tasted February 2008. NM
96 points Wine Spectator
Deep color. Very pure fruit confit aromas of cassis and blackberry. A rich La Tâche, with a combination of ripeness and high acidity. It’s up front in its appeal today, with a great nose and tight finish. (BS) (6/2006)
95 points Burghound
Fantastically pure with the classic spice box, hoisin and soy nose followed by big, rich, very structured flavors that display notes of earth, leather and tea. The tannins are big, ripe and are completely buffered by the sap with length that is simply phenomenal. This remains completely primary in character and seems not to have budged at all since it was bottled. A fine, if not genuinely great, vintage for La Tâche that is softer in the mouth than the ’96 Grands Ech and this should improve for another decade and last for 50 years. Very classy juice. (6/2019)
Cult Wines International Notes:
Domaine de la Romanée-Conti is the most famous wine estate in the world, and by most measures the greatest. From roughly 28 hectares in Vosne-Romanée and the Côte de Beaune, all of it grand cru, the domaine makes tiny quantities against limitless demand. La Tâche is its 6.06-hectare monopole, owned outright and farmed by no one else, and it is the wine many drinkers and critics judge the domaine’s most complete: fuller and more overtly powerful than Romanée-Conti itself, with the same haunting Vosne spice. Ownership is shared between the de Villaine and Leroy families, and in 1996 Aubert de Villaine was co-director. Farming was biodynamic in practice long before the word was fashionable, the fruit picked late, fermented with whole clusters, and raised entirely in new oak.
1996 is one of the great structural vintages in Burgundy. A long, warm summer brought high ripeness, but northerly winds through September locked in exceptional acidity, giving wines of unusual tension built for very long cellaring. Critics have consistently described this bottling as fantastically pure, offering spice box, hoisin and soy over black cherry and cassis confit, with big, ripe, well-buffered tannins and phenomenal length. Reviewers tasting it well into its second decade still found it primary in character, forecasting improvement for another decade and life for fifty years. At thirty years it is entering its window rather than leaving it. Decant, and give it time in the glass.
Bottle Size:
750 mL
Storage History:
Always stored properly in a climate controlled cellar.
Condition:
Some condensation stains on the rear label as shown. Overall excellent condition.
Please note: The bottle shown in the photos is the exact bottle being sold.
