It’s not so easy to write about my experience tasting the 2022 wines from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from barrel. I have tasted every vintage from bottle from 1985 to 2017. Additionally, beginning in the early 1990s, I have tasted every vintage from barrel up to the 2018 vintage. Tasting the 2022s was my first time back at the Domaine to taste from barrel since tasting the 2018s in 2019.
So from the foregoing, you can see that I have tasted many great vintages and many great wines from the Domaine. Consequently, when I say that I came away from my tasting of the 2022s feeling that it was the most impressive set of wines I’ve ever tasted there, that is a statement that means something. That said, as I pointed out in my introduction to the vintage overall, there are serious shortcomings to comparing wines across periods of time, just as there are to comparing paintings, music, literature, and so on across time:
"producers in a given era are responding to environments, problems, and questions that are of their era and not the same as those faced by producers in a different era. For wine, there is no question that global warming has changed the game in recent years and continues to do so. In particular, for Burgundy, the prospect of a vintage without sufficient ripeness is almost unthinkable these days, whereas the prospects of wines with excess alcohol and ripeness of fruit and deficient acidity are constant challenges.”
That said, Aubert de Villaine compares the vintage to 1959, a great and abundant year of wines that impressed and drank well immediately and where the greatest can still offer astonishing experiences.
Bertrand de Villaine, who has now taken over from his uncle Aubert de Villaine, said that the Domaine has been making various changes to deal with global warming. For example, in the past, dried berries were added back to the grapes to be fermented for their sugar, but the sugar no longer is needed.
After a small 2021 due to frost damage, a generous 2022 was expected — if all other elements went well — because the vines compensate that way. There was hot and mostly dry weather through mid-August, resulting in a an early bud break and an early and rather rapid flowering (the rapidity being important for uniformity of maturity at harvest time). By August, some vines had ceased to continue to progress in maturity, but rain from 15-18 August was just what was needed to remedy the problem.
Harvesting began on 30 August with the Corton. For 2022, all the reds are 100% whole cluster. The reds finished their malolactic fermentations in late April, but the whites were still fermenting when I visited in the first week of June. (I did taste the partially-fermented Corton-Charlemagne, reported below and not the definitive blend, but not the Montrachet). Also, because the Corton was in a different cellar, I did not taste that wine.
The estate, of course, has long been organic and biodynamic. (Continue reading here.)