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comparison ends there. In that earlier year, there were ten consecutive August days above 104°F (40°C), with nights warmer than a typical summer’s midday, and for much of the month the Sirocco scorch flared from the Sahara across the southern Rhône and up to Burgundy. Indeed, I noted, tasting the DRC wines in bottle at ten years, that they had “more than a little something of the south” in them. In 2020, the mercury (do those thermometers still exist?) didn’t even reach 104°F, let alone top it. Hot, yes, but more dry than hot. The summer nights were cool, and winds were frequently from the northwest, the Bay of Biscay’s Atlantic chill keeping temperatures down and acidities up. Harvest took place between August 23 and September 3 in excellent conditions. The grapes were picked in the morning only, while the fruit was cool, they were small, the skins black and thick, the crop in exceptional health.
Vintage style and quality 2020 is another astonishing year of outstanding quality for the Domaine, but the wines are delivering in a very different way from that of 2019. The 2020 spring skies were
incomparably beautiful, cleared of clouds by the cool northwesterlies, cleansed by the Covid lockdown-led reduction
64 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023
in greenhouse-gas emissions, and consequently of an infinitely deep and luminous blue, in a landscape quiet for the lack of internal combustion din. The wines are in some way emblematic of those skies, that calm. They speak of freshness, purity, and transparency, and they carry themselves with a sunny grace, a quiet serenity. Theirs is a very different sort of beauty, a very different voice from that of 2019—an individuality that is counterintuitive, considering the hot, dry summer and very early harvest. Power was not a word that came
readily to mind when tasting these, nor sap, density, mass, or matter. Those were the 2019s. Intensity, yes. The 2020s’ intensity is not in question— just the dynamics of delivery. I have described Romanée-Conti itself as having the balance of an immaculate strawberry: juicily sweet, lip-smacking in its sharpness, a defining acidity to make the juices run, exalted by its particular fruit fragrance. Teasing, exquisite, ethereal. That gives you some idea of the core characteristics of the Domaine’s 2020 reds.
They are ripe and tensile and, delicacy notwithstanding, structured. There is no
Above: The meticulously maintained barrels in the hallowed DRC cellars under Vosne-Romanée.
lack of superfine tannic support, but their scoring is just quieter than that of 2019. They are more transparently beautiful, strings- and woodwind-rich, if you like, without the brass and percussion. Perhaps this is a glorious, complete, “classical-in-the-best-sense” vintage…
Drinking dates Corney & Barrow, the UK’s DRC agents, always recommend earlier drinking dates than I do—based on considerable experience, they are at pains to point out, which I cannot claim. And that’s of course absolutely fine. Particularly as, these days, the wines are so very beautifully made and textured that it is less a question of waiting for the tannins to mellow than for the constituents to harmonize and the bouquet to develop. It is also, clearly, very much a question of personal taste and of what you value. If you are less interested in the details of bouquet and prefer primary-fruit punch, then by all means broach earlier. It’s a sort of “when are you, were you, will you be perfectly developed?” question. Answer me that! Wines have different stories to tell at different moments in time. As do we. For myself, I crave bouquet and mellowness. Both of which reward patience. But with these wines—well, almost any moment will more than reward.
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