The best bottles are always something more.
They are talismanic rites of passage to a place distant from the putative truths of empirical analysis, or the shallow notion that a wine is only as good as what is in the glass.
In the brittle cold of Paris in early January, as I struggled with the ignition of my rental car, I reminded myself that I was on my way to experience one of those bottles: a Romanée-Conti 1899, believed to be the last remaining.
This sort of bottle is usually traded at considerable profit.
Indeed, Romanée-Conti 1945 holds the record for the highest price ever fetched at auction: US$812,500 at Acker’s La Paulée sale in March this year. But the 1899 was purchased by Soo Hoo Khoon Peng to drink, a belated celebration of his 50th birthday.
A collector, businessman and co-owner of renowned Australian Pinot Noir producer Bass Phillip, Soo Hoo believes that wine ‘isn’t about status, but learning and human connection’, and was adamant that the bottle be shared among friends. I was glad to be among them.
I arrived at Michelin one-star restaurant Auprès de Clocher in Pommard to glimpse the time capsule set on a mantle, replete with a gloriously tattered label and a relatively healthy fill.
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Its heavy lead capsule was unblemished but for a chip here and there and a crease of rust.
The bottle augured well for the long lunch ahead, while photographers from major news networks dispersed and guests arrived.
‘Mercifully, the bottle wasn’t corked. Miraculously, it wasn’t volatile!’
Among those guests was Maison Pion fine wine director and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) specialist Régis Cimmati, who estimated the bottle’s worth at about US$118,000 based on provenance alone, going to great lengths to decipher the label’s nomenclature,
‘Seign…et’ indicating that the bottle had been sold to Bordeaux trader Seignouret, owned by the de Brou de Laurière family.
The guest of honour, however, was DRC co-owner Aubert de Villaine, who at 87 wove an array of anthologies with a historical loom, bringing the magical bottle to life with a glint in his eye and a spritely cadence to words that felt like an incantation.
He explained that the wine would have been bottled in Santenay back then, the barrels transported by horse and cart.
When the wine was made, Romanée-Conti was owned by families Guyot and Chambon, each surname visible on opposite sides of the label.
The Guyot clan later sold in 1912 to Jacques Chambon and Edmond Gaudin de Villaine and the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was established.
Cimmati explained that the bottle was sold at a local auction in a six-pack, designated ‘19th Century Red Wines’, after the last member of the de Brou de Laurière family died, in 2011.
Due to label damage, the bottle went unrecognised and the entire lot sold for barely €50!
De Villaine celebrated this with a grin, inferring his displeasure with the secondary market and its extreme pricing, while admitting he had never tasted a pre-1900 bottle; the oldest in the domaine’s stock dates to 1911.
The 1899 was later salvaged by a discerning buyer and eventually sold to Soo Hoo.
Another guest, Wine Advocate editor in chief William Kelley, was nominated to draw the cork. I breathed a sigh of relief that the responsibility wasn’t mine.
Mercifully, the bottle wasn’t corked. Miraculously, it wasn’t volatile!
A shimmering tawny tinged with red, vital and poised, there were hints of dried quince and tea leaf, sure, but the wine transcended any obvious fruit flavours with an incandescent, ineffable beauty.
Monsieur de Villaine swooned over the lingering finish, while Kelley noted a ‘heady vinosity’, born of prephylloxera vines. Cimmati enthused: ‘These pre-war ungrafted bottles are the pinnacle of the craft.’
There were other great bottles served that day, with my hat tipped to the 1980 La Tâche. Yet as friendships were kindled, wine’s spellbinding capacity to bring people together in celebration of a moment, resolute and invigorating, was clear.
A memento mori amid a cast of stars, the 1899’s semiotic powers were unrivalled.
In my glass this month
(Image credit: Renzo Seghesio)
Under the aegis of Federico Seghesio, Renzo Seghesio is a Barolo name on the rise, offering visceral joy across the range. However, it’s an outlier, Nebbiolo from the sandy turf of Roero – Roè 2023 – that sits in my glass most nights.
From a warm vintage, yet Nebbiolo’s perk and twirl are in full flight, as if the rose petal, kirsch and briar of Grenache has met the forestry accents of Pinot, all nicely compressed by Nebbiolo’s sinewy tannins.
One sip soon leads to a large draught and then an empty bottle. Best guzzled on the cooler side.
