Ratings & Tasting Notes:

98 points — Decanter (May 2016)
A wine continually changing in the glass and already showing remarkable complexity. Medium-full ruby with a pink rim. Wild berry, Asian spice and forest floor on the nose; wild strawberry and raspberry on the palate, with a truly succulent texture and a long cinnamon ice-cream finish.

98 points — Vinous (Antonio Galloni, March 2016)
Galloni describes a wine of almost raw, animal power, with stunning depth and intensity. Savoury, floral and red citrus notes are pushed forward in what he calls an unusually virile, imposing La Tâche. He cautions that readers will need patience — no surprise to anyone familiar with the vintage — and admits to being taken aback by how embryonic the wine still is.

97 points — Burghound (Allen Meadows, September 2023)
Revisiting the wine at eleven years of age, Meadows finds relatively little development on a moderately restrained nose showing good ripeness to its spiced green tea, hoisin, soy, anise, sandalwood and rose petal aromas. The cool, pure, seductively textured medium-weight-plus flavours brim with minerality and dry extract, buffering firm but not hard tannins across a youthfully austere and seriously persistent finish. He notes the finish has grown more supple since his first review, and concludes that despite considerable volume and muscle, this remains a La Tâche of finesse — in his word, brilliant.

97 points — Wine Advocate (Neal Martin, February 2015)
Martin records the picking on 25 and 27 September at 21 hectolitres per hectare. He describes an aromatic profile that stops you in your tracks, mixing red and black fruit with autumn leaves and wet limestone, and later something like roof tiles on a hot July afternoon. The palate is medium-bodied and close to perfectly balanced, with filigree tannins and extremely pure fruit carrying an intense minerality on the finish.

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. La Tâche is the larger of the domaine’s two monopoles at just over six hectares. The vineyard in its present form was settled by a 1936 court ruling that folded the neighbouring Les Gaudichots into the La Tâche appellation, giving the domaine sole ownership of the enlarged cru. Where Romanée-Conti is famously reticent in youth, La Tâche is the extrovert of the cellar — darker, more overtly powerful, and for many collectors the more thrilling wine to drink before either reaches full maturity.

2012 was one of the most punishing growing seasons in modern Burgundy. Spring frost, hail and heavy mildew pressure ran into a difficult flowering, and the surviving crop was among the smallest in decades — the domaine picked its La Tâche on 25 and 27 September at just 21 hectolitres per hectare. What fruit came in arrived concentrated and unusually intense. The wine is correspondingly dense and muscular for this cru: red and black fruit, autumn leaves, wet limestone, spiced tea, sandalwood and rose petal, with filigree tannins buffered by abundant dry extract and a mineral drive through a long, youthfully austere finish. More than a decade on it remains strikingly undeveloped, and critics revisiting it describe a wine of finesse rather than brute power, still well short of its peak.

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.

Label has some minor condensation stains as shown. Overall excellent condition. Bottle is discounted due to label stains.

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.