1999 La Tâche Grand Cru

The first article that I ever published on the subject of wine was not some breathless puff on a 100-point Chilean Merlot discovered two-for-one down at my local Tesco. Embarrassingly, my first vinous words (not Vinous words) regaled a morning in the company of the recently bottled 1999s from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti at Corney & Barrow back in the mists of time otherwise known as March 2002. That article can still be read on wine-pages.com – I beg you to overlook its amateur prose...I was just beginning. I felt privileged to taste such fabled wines, and never imagined that over ensuing years I would imbibe and write about Domaine de la Romanée-Conti many times. Life is funny like that, isn’t it? But in my mind there was never any chance of a rerun through those 1999s. To congregate those bottles again represents one mouth-watering but prohibitively expensive sitting. I mean, have you seen the price of the 1999 Romanée-Conti – a cool £180,000 per dozen. It probably increased another grand in the time it took me to type those zeros. So I make do with the memories and remain grateful that I have tasted every release since the 1995 vintage. The latest, the 2015s, was one of the domaine’s best.

The 20th century went out with a bang for red Burgundy lovers, with the 1999 vintage producing copious quantities of excellent to outstanding wine.

From the outset, the 1999 red Burgundies offered a rare combination of charm and power. Most of the better wines were balanced and alluring from the start, but they are evolving very slowly and still have plenty of life ahead of them. While many of the ‘99s I sampled with the producers this winter have gone through sullen stages in bottle, most of them have launched into their periods of peak drinkability. If you own these wines – and especially if you chose wisely at the outset – you will be amply rewarded.

The private dining room of David Chang’s Momofuku Ko was the site of this recent birthday dinner. The food and wine were both terrific, but as always, it’s the people who make an event special. Over the years, this group has tasted some pretty special wines together. That was once again the case on this night. Sommeliers John Slover and Chase Sinzers did a fabulous job keeping up with the pace and ensuring each wine was served at the optimal temperature.

Aubert de Villaine, always a tough critic of the DRC wines, told me that 1999 marked "the first time we couldn't have done anything better." In fact, this crop of wines has been sensational since day one, with superb concentration for the vintage and wonderfully silky textures. Sugar levels here were higher in 1999 than in 2000. In the latter year, DRC started the harvest on the first allowable day. "We're getting ripeness here very early," said de Villaine. "We don't have to lose acidity by waiting for more sugar." Potential alcohol levels were around 12.5% in 2000, and a little chaptalization was done to prolong the fermentations. Strict sorting of the fruit was done at the harvest: fully 25% of the crop was thrown out, declassified or sold off in bulk.

The DRC '99s were among the clear standouts of my November tastings: concentrated, highly aromatic and built to age. DRC essentially harvested in two stages: they began by picking thoroughly ripe grapes from their old vines on September 20, the first legal harvesting day for the grand crus, then went back through the vines again a few days later. According to Aubert de Villaine, the skins were healthy, tannins were completely mature, pHs were higher than those of the previous year, and the wines are likely to be bottled two or three months earlier than the '98s. It is a crop of wines, he says, that will always be seductive. The powerful, more perceptibly tannic '98s, in contrast, have evolved more slowly, says de Villaine. They have a very interesting future but need time, "like children whose very good intellectual potential can take a long time to reveal itself." It was the '99s that glittered on my recent visit.