Sampling Best of Top Red Vintages

A preview tasting of the soon-to-be-released 1986 red wines of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti was staged in San Francisco recently, and the best wine of the six, by acclamation of a dozen wine experts, was the La Tache.

But the differences between the wines were so slight as to make the tasting merely an exercise in determining the best value. And using the word value in relation to a Romanee-Conti wine is like using it in relation to a Rolls Royce.

DRC wines, as they are called by the cognoscenti, are among the most expensive wines in the world on release and they grow in value rapidly because so little is made--a total of 8,000 cases spanning all six designations.

The 1986 wines, even though they are rated a tad below the 1985s in quality, are again marvelous--exceptional wines of breed and depth.

La Tache, the second most prestigious DRC wine from year to year, showed fleshy, spicy richness, with a beefy, brawny, extractive quality that still shows a degree of finesse and warmth. It is a mouth-filling experience and, in many ways, more of a guarantee than the Romanee-Conti itself. It will retail for about $175 a bottle when it hits the shelves in a few weeks.

Top of the Line

The Romanee-Conti, uppermost wine in the DRC line every year (and a wine that this year will sell for $260 a bottle), is more Burgundian in nature, with traditional and classic hints of boiled beets and rose petals and with a faint anise element in the background.

Of this limited-production (600 cases) wine, Aubert de Villaine, co-owner of DRC, said it was clearly “the most seductive of the wines.”

The least expensive wine in the line (only $75), the Echezeaux, has an intense crushed rose-cinnamon nose and hints of nutmeg and leather, with a fairly full, ripe finish. More refined and showing excellent potential was the Grands Echezeaux ($115), with a silkiness and explosive fruit rarely found in Burgundies.

I was less intrigued by the Romanee-St.-Vivant ($138) and Richebourg ($165), though both are excellent wines. I felt the difference between them and the La Tache, all things considered, was so great that a few more dollars was justified: buy La Tache. (When you get into this rarefied atmosphere, what difference does $37 make?)

After the tasting was concluded, I realized that these wines are tasted by so few people that writing about them seemed pointless. But the mere existence of DRC in the marketplace points to this small property as the standard to which all of Burgundy is compared.

And in only one other wine region of the world is one such property so esteemed, and that is in Sauternes, where Chateau d’Yquem is accorded such a status.

Does DRC make the best red wines in the Burgundy district every year? Of course not. In many years, other houses exceed one or more of the DRC wines.

But with no other property is the quality so consistently high, meaning that buying a DRC wine gives the buyer a bottle bearing a comforting label and an unstated, unwritten, unspoken warranty against workmanship defects.

And, no, I have never had a bottle that required a 6,000-mile servicing. These things go for decades.