Romanée Conti, Domaine de la Romanée Conti 2009

As is often the case with this wine when it is young, the nose is almost always very restrained but even so the word brilliant doesn't begin to capture just how marvelous it is. It's a fool's errand to try and capture all of the various nuances but a few of the major components would include dried rose petals, hoisin, clove, anise and cassis that merge seamlessly into regal, pure and gorgeously intense middle weight flavors that possess seemingly limitless reserves of dry extract that almost completely hide the perfectly integrated tannins on the firm, mineral-driven, overtly austere and linear finish. This possesses such a spectacular nose that you don't even have to drink it to be thrilled and the flavors are perfectly spherical. This may well be the wine of the vintage because wine does not get much, if any, better. If you can somehow justify the scratch required, don't miss it. I would also note that I'm not much on using plus signs with a scoring hierarchy that is already implausibly precise yet I do so here to indicate that I have the smallest of preferences for the '09 Romanée-Conti vis-à-vis the La Tâche. Yes, it would perhaps be just as easy to assign the next highest number rather than adding the plus but this would imply that the '09 RC is as good as the '90, '99 or '05 versions, which even as spectacular as it is, I do not believe that it can quite match those efforts. Hence why I used the plus, just in case you may have wondered.