I sniffed and sipped and concentrated. It was a wine to savour, drop by drop. A Grands Echézeaux ’98 from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, this was not a mere bottle. It was an epiphany.
‘Great hatred, little room’: so Yeats summarised Irish history. We could paraphrase him for the DRC: great prices, little room. The clan chief, Romanée-Conti itself, is only four acres; one wonders what every grape is worth. For a chance to buy the wine, at more than £1,000 a bottle en primeur, you virtually have to be entered on a waiting list at birth.
I have only drunk it once. It was in the early Eighties at the Plough in Clanfield, Oxfordshire, where the wine list included a 1965 Romanée-Conti for £30. That was a hell of a price for a Burgundy from a bad year. Yet even in those days, it was a bargain for a Romanée-Conti. Did it live up to its reputation? No. I remember it as being drinkable, but nothing special.
A poor vintage is no basis for judgment. But I have heard serious Burgundians grumble about Romanée-Conti. One, who had assisted in the drinking of a couple of bottles from sound years, said that he did not know what the fuss was about. Good? Certainly. Great? Almost. Worth the price? Never. If you could exchange a single bottle of Romanée-Conti for a case of Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, do so.
Whatever the exchange rate for the Grands Echézeaux, I would be reluctant to take it. It was the most feminine wine I have ever drunk. Silken, coy, insinuating and witty, it released its charms with a gracious irony. Gentle reader, if that strikes you as absurd, you should have been alongside me striving to find words to do justice to the occasion. Even as the final droplets danced from glass to palate, that wine had a twinkle in its eye — and was asserting its intellectual equality with those who were drinking it.
In the conversation after the miraculous draught of Grands Echézeaux, we agreed that the EU was not wholly bad. Pinot noir is a truculent grape. It does not readily express its feminity in joyous compliance. Like Tam o’ Shanter’s beldame, it can nurse its wrath to keep it warm. Over the centuries — though never in the DRC — the men who had to make their living by taming this shrewish creature resorted to expedients. If the grapes did not produce enough fruit, add some from another source.
The Hermitaged Lafite school of Burgundy-making produced some outstanding wine. Then along came the EU and demanded botanical purity. If a wine claimed to be made from pinot noir, nothing else was permissible. There were protests, from those of us who were accustomed to the heavy, almost black Burgundies of the ancien regime. We were wrong.
There had always been Burgundian houses who respected their own grapes in their native terroir. Partly due to improvements in viniculture, others have joined them. Burgundian pinot noir has improved and is improving, which is just as well, given the price of claret. I cannot see why experiments should be prohibited. If Burgundians wish to blend pinot noir with other grapes, why not — as long as the details are on the label. But there may be a good reason why this should be banned. There might not be enough pinot noir to go round.
Claret or Burgundy? I always associate claret with the Scottish Enlightenment: the wine that David Hume and Adam Smith would have offered one another. Its minerality is the perfect accompaniment to an Edinburgh east wind. Burgundy is a south-wind wine: gentle zephyrs, warm arms, a boudoir with a satin linining. Claret: the great intellects of 18th-century Edinburgh in rigorous discussion. Burgundy: Rabbie Burns in pursuit of houghmagandie.
What I am struggling to say is this. That ’98 Grands Echézeaux was wondrous.
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