Did I WASTE a FORTUNE on ONE BOTTLE of WINE?

Did I WASTE a FORTUNE on ONE BOTTLE of WINE?

Some wines play in a different league: The Premier Grand Crus from Bordeaux, The Cult Cabernets from Napa, and Super Tuscan from Italy for instance. Above all of them hovers one winery though that represents the pinnacle of quality and fetches the highest prices anyone would be prepared to pay for a bottle of wine.

Wine lovers only need three letters to understand which winery I am talking about DRC, or more precisely: Domaine de la Romanee Conti. One Bottle from the Domaine shattered the record for 0.75 liters of fermented grape juice when the 1945 DRC Romanee Conti sold for 558.000 Dollars or 744 Dollars per Milliliter.

You have asked me many times and I have wanted to make a video about tasting a wine from DRC for a while, I have tried, but these wines are hard to get and extremely expensive. So when the good people from Idealwine reached out, asking me to collaborate with them I told them Yes, but only if I get to spend all of the money I make on this collaboration on one bottle of wine … a bottle of DRC to be more precise. So let's see whether I will get a bottle filled with the Drops of God and then check whether I have wasted a fortune … Shall we?

DRC is located in Burgundy right in the Côte D’Or in a little Village called  Vosne Romanée. The village is pretty but looks like many other villages in Burgundy. Behind the village are the vineyards and they are meticulously tended – I have rarely seen tidier vineyards – but apart from that they do not have anything special about them.

However, this part of the golden Slope has been highly-priced for a long time.  In 1760, the La Romanee vineyard was purchased by Louis François I de Bourbon, the Prince of Conti for 8,000 livres, which was a lot of money at the time. But the price had been driven up by other bidders, including the king’s mistress, Madame Pompadour.

He did not sell the wine – no – he kept it to himself and poured it at his parties to his rich and famous friends thus establishing the winery's reputation amongst the elites. He also changed the name to Romanee Conti. Over the centuries the estate changed hands a few times. The de Villaine family bought half of the estate’s shares in 1869; the other half has been owned by the Leroy family since 1942. 

Today the vineyards of DRC are still a place of pilgrimage for winos from all corners of the world. And this wine nerd has visited the site many times over the years.