1999 Grands Echézeaux Grand Cru

This was a wonderful evening centered around some of the best Italian dishes I’ve eaten in a long while. Who knew that it would transpire, in all places, in Bangkok? We enjoyed a stellar array of wines, and more importantly, the guests really made it a memorable evening.

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.

This wine was tasted in a remarkable survey of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s Grands-Échézeaux and Richebourg that spanned four decades going back to 1966. The setting was the World Wine Symposium at the Villa d’Este in Lake Como, one of the most idyllic places anywhere in the world. Co-Manager Aubert de Villaine presided over the tasting with his usual dry, understated sense of humor. “I am sure many of you, like me, you could stay for hours having a dialogue with these wines. It’s much better than with many people…” I can’t argue with that.

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.