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The August 2020 Auction: Part 1

Auction # 618 | View Auction Schedule and Details
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Auction Ends: 8/6/2020 6:00:00 PM PDT

Lot #121. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Montrachet 2017

Description: Consists of 1 Bottle, 0.75L
Score: 99 WA.
"Aromas of crisp green pear, citrus oil, mandarin, fresh pastry, clear honey and oak vanillin introduce the 2017 Montrachet Grand Cru, a full-bodied, deep and textural wine that's voluminous and powerful but incisive, with racy structuring acids and a long, chalky and elegantly honeyed finish. "If we had tried to conceive of the ideal Montrachet, we might have imagined something like this," admits Bertrand de Villaine, and the 2017 certainly numbers among the finest renditions of this iconic bottling over the last decade and beyond. The Domaine de la Romanée-Conti's 2017s are showing brilliantly from bottle, and this tasting with Bertrand de Villaine was one of the absolute high points of my two months of visits along the Côte d'Or. While barrel tasting is informative, there is no substitute for tasting finished wines in bottle—especially at an estate such as the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, where élevage is quite long and the wines are allowed to take their time—and spending an hour or two with full glasses of wines such as these is not merely of immense professional interest but, I admit, a source of great personal pleasure. Bertrand de Villaine observed that the development of the 2017s in barrel and in bottle has been "reassuring," as the wines have gained in depth and profundity despite a vintage that marks the domaine's most generous yield since 2009—despite the domaine's spring debudding, its low-yielding vine selections and the high average age of its vines. Revisited in bottle, the wines show even better than they did from barrel, and it is clear that this is a vintage that will give immense pleasure to anyone able to secure a few bottles. Hauntingly aromatic, structurally supple and pungently intense, this vintage will drink well younger than both its 2016 and 2015 predecessors, but it is much closer in quality to those two vintages than I perceived 12 months ago. At the end of our tasting, the group spent some time discussing possible analogies, and the comparison I found the most compelling is with the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti's 1985 vintage. Indeed, I had drunk a superb 1985 Grands-Echézeaux from the domaine over dinner with a good friend a few days before my visit, and the similarities in overall balance between the two vintages were strikingly apparent as I tasted through the young 2017s. The domaine's 2017 Montrachet also merits special comment, as it is a magical wine built for the ages." Wine Advocate Interim, Jan 2020
Provenance: The Cedrus Cellar
Lot Location: Orange County
Estimate: $7,000

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