2015 Corton 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.

My January tasting of 2016s from barrel and 2015s from bottle at DRC was one of the most spectacular visits of my 30 years of tasting in Burgundy. Director Aubert de Villaine chose to present his 2015s first, possibly for fear that they might be tricky to taste following the theoretically more energetic 2016s. He needn’t have worried: both sets of wines are brilliant.

Both vintages, noted de Villaine, brought fully ripe fruit, and the ‘15s have even greater phenolic ripeness than the ‘16s. “But their tannins are nourishing,” he said, “and the wines are serene despite the bottling last March." He compared 2015 to 1966 in terms of the perfect health of the vineyards, adding that the estate saw no drought effect in ’15. “I don’t remember ever having this balance of fruit and plenitude and structure in my career,” said de Villaine. “The ‘15s will bury all of us.” It’s hard to believe that such rich wines will not shut down in bottle within the next few years, possibly for an extended period, but the ‘15s showed spectacularly in January.

So did the young ‘16s, in spite of the devastating effects of frost in the estate’s Echézeaux and Grands-Echézeaux holdings, not to mention its vineyards in Batard-Montrachet and, especially, Montrachet. But production of its other red grand crus showed little or no frost losses. Owing to the very warm temperatures that began in mid-July and well-timed rainfall in mid-August and early September, the estate considered its fruit ripe by September 15. But it held off on harvesting until the 22nd for its Corton vines and the following day in Vosne-Romanée, taking advantage of the precipitation between September 16 and 18 and picking during the most favorable window, finishing on the last day of the month.

Ultimately, said de Villaine, the quality of the tannins in 2016 may be even higher than in the previous vintage. The perfectly healthy grapes required very little sorting but the estate generally destemmed about 30% to 50% of their grape clusters; in comparison, the 2015s, with the exception of the Corton, were vinified with essentially 100% whole clusters. The 2016 malos were late and the wines had not yet been racked in January. The vintage, said de Villaine, is proving to be "extremely well balanced and a delightful surprise."

During my visit, I had the chance to wish a healthy and active next phase to long-time cellarmaster Bernard Noblet, who spent 37 years at this estate in a demanding and very physical role before retiring at the end of January at the age of 62.

As Aubert de Villaine was on a business trip to Asia, I tasted at DRC in December with his nephew Bertrand de Villaine, who will be Aubert’s likely successor as director of this great estate. Bertrand showed me the domain’s brilliantly pure 2014s from bottle first, after which we walked down the street to the barrel cellar to sample the ‘15s, an amazingly rich set of wines made from grapes harvested at 13% potential alcohol or higher (part of the Echézeaux came in at 14%, according to Bertrand) and vinified entirely with whole clusters. In his detailed report on the 2015 growing season and harvest, Aubert de Villaine described the ripeness in 2015 as both homogeneous and extreme, but without any evidence of surmaturité. Fermentations lasted longer than usual owing to the strong phenolic maturity and high sugars. As is often the case 14 months after the harvest, some of the wines had been racked due to reduction but others had not.

DRC harvested their vines on the hill of Corton on September 5, then picked in Vosne-Romanée from September 7 through 14, with only a portion of the Echézeaux coming in after the rain on the 12th. Yields were in the very low range of 22 to 30 hectoliters per hectare. According to Bertrand de Villaine, the estate opted not to pick "the grapes roasted by sun and the short clusters."