nouveau / liquid assets / preview / review


2020 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti: An impossible calibration


Michael Schuster wonders how to rate the sublime ripeness, definition, intensity, beauty, and transparency of the latest releases, as wondrous as the very grand 2019s but in an utterly different way


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s a back-to-back pair of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti vintages, 2020 and 2019 are as wonderful as each other in quality but about as different in style and character as you can imagine. My scores are all but identical to those for the 2019s, but what they represent as a vinous experience is utterly different, so contrasting are the proportions, the structure, and the characteristics of the two years.


Production figures The good news is that 2020’s yield was healthy after a 2019 that was more than meager. This year, most of the wines made just above their 2010–17 “average”


production. La Tâche was a little below; Romanée-St-Vivant was an exception in that it made just shy of its 2014 high. And the “new” Corton-Charlemagne made another exceptional wine, at three times the quantity of 2019, its first DRC vintage. For the purposes of comparison, as every year now, I have given the production figures at the head of each wine’s note as follows: the 2020 yield to the nearest hectoliter per hectare; the 2020 production in dozens; for comparison, the average annual production in dozens from 2010 to 2017; and the highest annual production since 2009. The ABV is also listed, of course.


The growing season The 2020 growing season was affected first (and foremost?) by its precocious start. After a well-watered winter, producing reserves that would just about support the vines during the very dry summer, budburst was notably early, on March 20, initiating what would be a precocious cycle in the vineyards right across the viticultural year. This in turn led to an exceptionally early start to the old-vines harvest, on exactly the same day as in 2003—August 23, three weeks earlier than in 2019. But the 2003


Below: The cross below the DRC grands crus, the most iconic of all such memorials in vineyards.


62 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023


All photography by Jon Wyand


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