2001 Romanée-Conti Grand Cru

This truly once in a lifetime tasting of wines from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was one of many highlights of last year’s Villa d’Este Wine Symposium, which was held from November 6-9 on the picturesque, idyllic shores of Lake Como in Italy.

Aubert de Villaine was one of a few chateau proprietors who wondered aloud what all the fuss was regarding the 2002 vintage. Yes, there was more sugar in 2002 than in 2001, as well as more acidity," he told me, "but the maturity came quickly after the early September rains, thanks to the sun and water available to the vines.It's a very good vintage that produced extremely nice wines, but it's not 1999. And it's not a particularly powerful vintage."De Villaine is high on his 2001s, however. It's a great, dense vintage, classic and seductive.The 2001s have been an extraordinary surprise."In my November tasting, they were even more impressive than the 2002s, even if the top two wines were a bit inscrutable at this early stage. DRC is experimenting with using microbullage(introducing small amounts of air in this case, not oxygen) to avoid one racking, and is also leaving some of the 2002 barrels on their original lees clear up to the assemblage (Wilson-Daniels, Ltd., St. Helena CA

With our warmer climate of recent years, we have to be careful not to get surmaturite said Aubert de Villaine. With organic farming, the season of vegetation is shorter and we get earlier ripeness. In two out of three years, we face a battle between ripeness and rot," he added. In 2001, rot was not a factor but we had less phenolic ripeness than in 2000. It was necessary to harvest carefully. We kept the fruit from the first passage through the vines, but the second pass actually brought less-ripe fruit that we ultimately declassified." Because the domain practices more careful selection than ever before, the lees are cleaner today. We previously experimented with retaining some lees, but since '99 we keep the fine lees with all of our wines throughout their elevage said Villaine. The Domaine de la Romanee-Conti continues to bottle in six-barrel batches, which means that some bottle variation is inevitable. I had a few problematic bottles among the 2000s I tasted, although it was not obvious whether the issue was slightly bad corks or simply shock from the bottling last spring ("a rebellion against imprisonment" is how Villaine put it). Villaine describes the 2000s as pure, solid wines that can be enjoyed now ("why not?") or laid down for seven or eight years.