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Romanée Conti 2015

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Burgundy, France

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti
Burgundy France
  • 100
    Points
  • The 19 best
    of 3 290 954
    wines globally
  • 47 Pros of
    47 recommend
    this wine
650 100
  • Taste
  • Moment

  • Country ranking ?

    16

  • Producer ranking ?

    3

  • Decanting time

    4h

  • When to drink

    from 2025

  • Food Pairing

    Roasted game with mushrooms

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2015 IS THE MOST REMARKABLE VINTAGE OF MY CAREER’

The 2015 vintage will go down as one of the ‘easiest’ vintages of the century, when nature plays a major role in wine quality. A damp but generally mild winter was followed by a warm, dry Spring and hot Summer. Early flowering continued by warm temperatures and moderate northerly winds, ensured even fruit ripeness. Long fermentations of whole bunch clusters produced rich, concentrated wines....

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The Story

 “As if, in this square of earth, the gods had bequeathed us a memory of the fascinating vestige of a timeless perfection.” — Richard Olney. The wine of Prince de Conti, she is velvet, seduction and mystery. It is the most Proustian of all great wines.

 

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti is without question the most famous estate in Burgundy and arguably the greatest, producing some of the best wines in the world. It is probably one of the mos...

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Wine Information

2015 Harvest report - The vineyards celebrate their inscription to the Unesco World Heritage list.


This harvest does not resemble any other one: the berries are small and compact with no sign of millerandage and their skins are tight and full of anthocyanins and ripe tannins. There is average quantity and the early and ultra-fast flowering ensured an exceptionally homogeneous and complete maturity, without ever reaching over-maturity.

...

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Vintage 2015

The 2015 Harvest by Clive Coates MW

The bad news is Chablis. In the early hours of Tuesday 1st September a severe storm hit the Chablis area. From Irancy up to the grands crus of Blanchots and Les Clos a swathe of hail – some hailstones as large as golf balls – has affected some 100 hectares of the vineyard. In all 97 mm of rain fell in six hours. The weather then cleared, threatening rot, and most growers rushed out to harvest before it wa...

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Tasting note

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Written Notes

The 2015 had a deep, dark nose with lots of stalky and rocky fruit and a whiff of good wood from the forest.  Red and purple flowers were abundant in this deep wine.  Its palate was rich and long, and while still young it didn’t feel too young.  There was lots of garden goodness to the palate in a royal way.  There was a great, tight, rusty edge and loads of acidity on its “luscious palate of extraordinary power,” noted one.  James Suckling noted “dried strawberry and baby fat - for a baby that goes to the gym” 😂 (98pts)

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  • 98p

This is a superb young RC with a dark ruby color. The purity of fruit is out of this world with what I call the essence of pinot noir, with strawberry, orange peel, cedar and rose stem. It’s medium-bodied with very tight, seamless tannins that run the length of the wine and continues endlessly. Enchanting aftertaste of hibiscus, lavender and hints of stone. Weightless form at the end. Give it 10 years more.

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  • 100p

Full dark red. Slightly darker and more reticent on the nose than La Tâche, dominated in the early going by black raspberry, cherry, spices, crushed rock and coffee. Enters the mouth like liquid velvet, expanding to show an incredible 3-D texture and great depth to its soil-inflected flavors of flowers, spices, mocha, underbrush and savory minerality. At the first sip, this utterly seamless, spherical yet rather youthfully impenetrable wine saturates the entire palate like a thunderstorm breaking out across a wide front. Today I don't find the typical early vegetal nuances of this wine, perhaps owing to the total ripeness of the vintage. Still an infant, this wine should easily evolve positively for three decades or more. When I spit this wine, I thought I still had it in my mouth, such is its impression of solidity.

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  • 98p

This royal red offers a beam of succulent, pure cherry, oak spice, sandalwood and cinnamon notes. Intensely flavored, with a distinctive creaminess and harmony. Expands on the finish, where all the components come together, tying this up neatly on the lingering spice- and mineral-infused aftertaste.

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  • 98p

Amazingly complex nose in which every DRC ingredient seems to mingle. Real savour and beautiful balance. Essence de RC! Already manages both majesty and grace. Lift and freshness. Tingle and great length. Difficult to find any fault! Grows on the end. In hot years it never suffers water stress. (I’m sure many bottles will be drunk long before 2035…)

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  • 100p

Sometimes, try as I might, words fail to communicate adequately those few transcendent experiences where a wine is just so amazing that it's impossible to capture it. The 2015 Romanée-Conti would be one of those experiences so you will simply have to accept the limitations of the written word. The breathtakingly beautiful nose is restrained to the point of being almost mute yet aggressive agitation eventually reveals an exotically broad-range of highly perfumed floral, spice, tea and incense-like nuances. The opulently textured, concentrated and equally mineral-driven flavors accentuate the perfumed character of the nose as the inner mouth perfume just adds to the what is roughly akin to an sensorial assault, all wrapped in a finish that lasted for seemingly several days as I had no trouble recalling it over the next 48 hours. If there's any imperfection that I could detect, there is a hint of warmth but otherwise, this is pretty close to perfect. The word spectacular comes to mind but then again so does brilliant, fabulous and splendid. You get the idea - pretty damn remarkable.

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  • 99p
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Information

Origin

Vosne-Romanée, Burgundy

Other wines from this producer

Bâtard-Montrachet

Corton-Charlemagne

Corton Grand Cru

Echézeaux

Grands Echézeaux

La Romanée-Conti Grand Cru

La Tâche

Les Gaudichots

Marc

Montrachet

Richebourg

Romanee Saint Vivant

Vosne Romanée

Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Cuvée Duvault Blochet

Inside Information

Co-director Aubert de Villaine described the 2016 growing season as "one that did not start well as the winter was too warm with no vineyard cleansing deep frosts to kill various pests taking refuge in the soil. The predictable result of the warmer and wetter than normal spring was a precocious bud break. To provide an idea of just how wet it was, 516 mm of rain fell in Vosne between January 1st and the end of May, which would be the most ever recorded since 1910, which was the rainiest year ever in Burgundy. [There was basically no harvest in 1910 and the cellars flooded to the point that barrels were floating in the streets!] There were very few days without rain and it was very difficult to organize the vineyard treatments as conditions made it all-but-impossible to enter the vineyards with machinery. This was a critical period because some 35 cycles of the redoubtable vineyard enemy mildew were reported, which is the most we have ever seen. Again, to provide perspective, normally we have only one cycle and in certain vintages, such as 2015, none at all. As if this weren't bad enough, at the end of April the North Wind cleared the skies of protecting clouds, the temperatures fell rapidly to zero and we woke to find our vines in Montrachet, Bâtard-Montrachet, Echézeaux and Grands Echézeaux badly burned by frost. Thankfully our other vineyards were basically untouched so we were lucky compared to many vignerons in other communes. The mildew remained relentless and despite the unceasing efforts of our vineyard workers, and our unwavering commitment to our biodynamic farming principles, we did suffer some losses because of it.

 

Not surprisingly, all the wet weather and mildew weren't propitious for the unusually extended flowering that lasted from the 9th to the 25th of June. This engendered quite a bit of shatter which is good for quality but at the cost of reducing yields still further. This is what we dealt with until about the 15th of July and then, as if by divine providence, the weather changed for the better and would continue as such until the harvest. We were exceptionally fortunate in that these clement conditions essentially allowed the vines to recover from the spring and early summer challenges and bring the fruit to an excellent level of ripeness. We chose to begin picking on the 22nd of September with our parcels in Corton which are always the first to mature. Then on the 23rd and 24th we picked the Richebourg, La Tâche on the 24th and 25th, Romanée Conti on the 25th, Romanée St. Vivant on the 27th and 28th and finished on the 29th in only one day with our 8.25 ha of Echézeaux and Grands Echézeaux as neither had much fruit to harvest. In fact losses in those two vineyards alone were about 90% compared to a normal vintage! On the plus side, there was almost no sorting required as the fruit was exceptionally clean with excellent maturity levels and perhaps just as importantly the ripeness levels were largely uniform. The skins were thick and there was a high incidence of shot berries that just added to the density of the musts. We used on average 70% whole clusters during a total cuvaison that lasted about 20 days. In the end it was almost as though we had two growing seasons in one in that the first part was genuinely terrible and exhausting and frankly we were dispirited and without much hope. By contrast the second, and most important, was tranquil and calm and left us happy with the results. Speaking of which, I can observe that each time I taste the 2016s I am surprised by how they keep improving month by month.

 

I am honestly surprised by how good the wines are as I certainly didn't expect this level of quality based on the difficulties of the growing season. They aren't as powerful as the 2015s but they have an extraordinarily good level of finesse and terroir transparency. And the Echézeaux may be the best that we have ever made. While I am of the view that each vintage is necessarily unique, if I had to choose another recent year to compare with 2016, I might suggest 2012." With respect to the now in-bottle 2015s, de Villaine added that "the year gave us perhaps the best growing season that I have ever seen together with the best fruit that I have ever seen. 1966 and 1999 might rival it but either way, it is a spectacular vintage." De Villaine also noted that as was the case in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, there will be no Vosne "1er" cuvée Duvault-Blochet in 2016; lastly, the 2015s revisited below, were bottled between February and April 2017. I would observe that while the Domaine's 2016 are genuinely wonderful wines, and particularly so for their refinement, they simply cannot match the magnificent quality of their 2015s. Beg, borrow or steal but do yourself a favor and find a few bottles for your cellars.

by Allen Meadows

For more information, visit www.burghound.com

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