DRC 2021 in bottle: Seven wines and two library vintages tasted

Although 2021 is distinctly different from other recent vintages, they have a delicious elegance, and if they lack the robust power of 2018, 2019 or 2020, their finesse shows a charm of its own. To understand the vintage, one must judge the wines on their own terms.

The recent launch of the bottled wines from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti began with a recap of the vintage by Bertrand de Villaine; ‘incredible’ in his words.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for seven DRC 2021 wines and two library vintages

As he described it, a warm, wet spell in January was followed by dry weather, a cold snap and then spring-like temperatures in late March. This warm spring weather tricked the vines into an early budbreak that was cruelly cut down by hard frost and snow between 6-8 April.

During the worst of the frost, temperatures got down as low as -9°C. Although de Villaine felt that attempts to salvage the harvest were a ‘quest of Don Quixote’, his team struggled mightily. The 37 full-time workers flew into the vineyards to protect what they could with candles and fans, yet the frost destroyed much of the year’s production.

De Villaine explains that the yield was a difficult subject: there were 60% losses in Montrachet, but on the hill of Corton they lost 80% of the Pinot Noir, and an even greater proportion of the Corton-Charlemagne. He says that they were able to protect all of Romanée-Conti with candles (and part of Grands Echézeaux), and here the yields were more generous, but that the overall average for Vosne-Romanée was a miniscule nine hl/ha. They protected the bottom of the La Tâche slope, yet oddly, the upper reaches were more severely affected by frost, although usually cold air will settle to lower elevations.

The domaine’s careful replanting programme further reduced yields: 0.17ha in Corton Bressandes and 0.8ha in Richebourg are not in production. To compound the dismay of the vignerons, the vines were not granted a reprieve after this devastating frost. Temperatures remained low as rains continued, and workers in the vines struggled throughout the season with odium and botrytis.

A Burgundian miracle

The story was continued by de Villaine’s co-director Perrine Fenal, who related that at the eleventh hour, ‘le miracle bourguignon‘ appeared: the clouds cleared, the sun came out and the grapes (finally) ripened. They began to change colour (veraison) in mid-August, but the harvest was delayed due to the weather, and the domaine picked between 22 September and 2 October.

The year’s conditions necessitated rigorous sorting and delivered grapes with thinner skins, yet Domaine de la Romanée-Conti followed its conviction of recent years and vinified the entire harvest as whole clusters. Because the grapes had a high liquid-to-solid ratio, the extraction was done gently, with less punching down than in recent years, but the wines were aged in 100% new barrels, albeit with a shorter maturation, with bottling from mid-December of 2022 through to May 2023.

With losses of anywhere from 60%-90% of their crop, de Villaine and Fenal hesitated to do the traditional tasting of the bottled wines yet found it was essential to inspire the confidence of the chief export markets. One suspects they also wanted to breathe a sigh of relief at the undeniable quality of the results, which they described as ‘wines of purity and transparency, with brightness and the joy felt on the verge of the despair at the frost’.

We tasted the entire range, with the exception of the wines from Corton and Corton-Charlemagne that had endured such terrible losses; we were also unable to taste the Vosne-Romanée premier cru Duvault-Blochet, which this year contained all of the Vosne-Romanée Petits Monts along with the young vines from the grand crus, especially Echézeaux and Romanée-Saint-Vivant.

Fortunately for wine lovers, the dearth of wine in 2021 will not be permanent; although 2021 was the smallest crop in 50 years, 2022 was the largest crop ever produced at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

Seven DRC 2021 wines and two library vintages

The wines are listed in vintage order youngest to oldest by score

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