Plus Ça Change: DRC 2020 in Bottle
BY NEAL MARTIN |
If you can stop drooling at the prospect of drinking Romanée-Conti for breakfast, you will spot a framed drawing hanging on Corney & Barrow’s tasting room wall portraying a wine tasting from a bygone era.
I stop drooling.
(Temporarily.)
A framed drawing hanging on Corney & Barrow’s tasting room wall.
I assume it depicts Corney & Barrow’s former premises back when the East End was obviously more verdant. Yes…come to think of it…I vaguely remember that day. Probably around the first DRC tasting I attended way back in 1997. The woman in the black apron is pouring La Tâche and silently praying that the men will leave some for her to taste. I wager that is the domaine’s former owner Jacques-Marie Duvault-Blochet in the brown suede frock jacket and neck ruff looking on intently, while the rather smug-looking gentleman in black must surely be a rival member of the fourth estate. Possibly you have recognized already, but that’s yours truly in the green velvet tailcoat and breeches when my hair was shorter and darker. Of course, this predates my trusty iPad. In those days, I unsheathed my quill and composed florid tasting notes upon vellum. Once sealed by wax, the notes were handed to a rider whose steed galloped through roaring crowds to the Middle Drawbridge outside the Tower of London. Here, the vellum was handed to a jowly rotund town crier who bellowed: “Hear ye! Hear ye! The latest scores from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti” to an assembled ragbag of wine merchants. Bare-footed ragamuffins were then hastily assigned to sprint through the city’s crowded cobbled streets to transmit this news to aristocrats and wine buffs who spent several weeks deliberating whether to fill the dank cellars with the noblest Burgundy or spend their shillings on “proper” wine, like German Hock.
