The Domaine That Sets the Price

Romanée-Conti is one hectare and eighty-one ares. La Tâche is six hectares and six. Those two numbers explain more about the most famous wines in the world than anything anybody has written about how they taste, and it is worth fixing them in mind before reading another word about the subject.

A good year at the yields the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti actually crops, well below what the appellation permits, produces something like six thousand bottles of Romanée-Conti for the entire planet. That is a supply constraint no amount of demand can relieve, and it is permanent, because nobody is making any more of that slope.

The domaine's response to it is the assortment, which is the most effective allocation device in wine. The grands crus are sold as a mixed case rather than individually, so anybody who wants the famous bottle must buy the others as well. This spreads demand across the range so no cuvée is orphaned, and it makes acquiring the headline wine expensive in a way that filters out people who merely want a trophy. An allocation from a merchant is also a relationship maintained over years rather than a purchase, which is why it cannot simply be bought into by anybody with money.

The viticulture is worth separating from the mythology, because the notable decisions are old, public and entirely reproducible. Very low yields. Whole clusters in the ferment. Late picking, within reason. And a willingness to decline to bottle under the grand cru name in a vintage that does not deserve it, which is the expensive one. Any grower on the Côte could adopt every item on that list tomorrow. What cannot be adopted is 1.81 hectares of a particular slope and roughly two centuries of never making a mistake in public.

That is the actual lesson, and it generalises well beyond this domaine. The reproducible parts of a great producer's practice are reproducible, and people do reproduce them. The unreproducible parts are land and time, and no amount of care substitutes for either.

Then there is the price, about which the honest thing to say is that above a certain level it stops measuring the wine. It measures scarcity, provenance, the auction market and the confidence of people who will never open the bottle. That is not a criticism of the liquid, which may well be extraordinary; it is a description of what the number is an index of. Six thousand bottles meeting global demand would command extraordinary prices whatever was in them, and the fact that the wine is also superb does not make the price evidence of the superbness.

There is a final effect worth naming because it operates on every very scarce thing. When almost nobody tastes a wine, its reputation travels by report rather than by experience, and reports compound while experiences would vary. A weak vintage from a celebrated and tiny domaine gets corrected slowly, if at all, because there are not enough tasters to generate a contrary consensus. Scarcity insulates reputation from evidence.

None of which is an argument against the domaine, which by every credible account makes some of the greatest wine in existence. It is an argument for keeping two questions apart: whether a wine is extraordinary, and whether the price is evidence that it is. Most confusion about fine wine comes from collapsing those, and the collapse is encouraged by almost everybody with something to sell.