Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Corton, Grand Cru 2022

“The 2022 Corton Grand Cru is open and accessible, offering up aromas of plums and red fruit preserve mingled with exotic spices and creamy new oak. Medium to full-bodied, soft and velvety, with a broad attack that segues into a rich core of exuberant fruit, it’s sweet and succulent, concluding with a broad, discreetly heady finish. It was here that the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s harvest began, on 30 August 2022, and as usual, the cuvée unites holdings in Clos du Roi, Bressandes and Renardes.

If the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 2021 vintage was all about flowers and spices, the 2022s are all about fruit. These are rich, generous wines, for the most part very integrated out of the gates, and though they’ll surely reward patience, they will not demand it. If one must find a recent analogy, it might be some sort of amalgam of 2018’s ripeness and generosity of fruit with the more suave, transparent structure of 2017, but the comparison that came to mind as I tasted the wines was in fact with the domaine’s 1964s. Harvest began with the red Corton plots on 30 August, finishing with Échézeaux and Corton-Charlemagne on 13 September. After the historically low yields of 2021, the vines bounced back, delivering a comparatively bountiful crop of between 37 and 43 hectoliters per hectare in Pinot Noir, with good levels of ripeness. Sorting now aims to eliminate desiccated and dehydrated berries, something that wasn’t the case in the past, and the slow evolution toward shorter cuvaison and élevage continues. In the past, bottling followed fast on the heels of racking, but today the wines now spend three to four weeks in tank (as ever, in six-barrel lots) before bottling to reduce turbidity. The whites were bottled in December 2023, and the reds between January and June of 2024.” RP – 93 Points

Drink 2025 – 2052