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100 AM.
Mild bricking but otherwise, the appearance remains remarkably youthful for a 60+ year old wine. A highly expressive and equally youthful nose that evidences the last vestiges of primary fruit together with the now mostly secondary fruit aromas that offer up simply unbelievably complexity that only maturity in a great vintage can bring. It's rare when you don't have to drink a wine to appreciate its transcendent beauty and it is in all candor impossible to convey in words the dramatic bouquet of the '45, which offered incredibly seductive nose of blackberry cassis, violets, sous bois nuances, warmth earth, tea, soy, anise, clove and animale notes with a wonderful background note of dried rose petal that you notice in a garden on a warm summer's day. The flavor profile is equally difficult to capture because I immediately thought of the '34 Romanée-Conti that I have enjoyed with its perfect spherical sense of harmony; seamless perfection as it were. There are actually very few wines where each component dissolves into its neighbor in a way that doesn't permit examination of only one aspect in isolation. In this sense, from a professional's point of view, this wine initially frustrated me because it simply didn't permit examination in my normal detached, methodical fashion. I couldn't logically proceed from one component to another as each simply evaded my grasp, teasing yet encouraging; indeed in this sense, it reminded me of an 1865 Santenots I once drank that was also an exercise of perfect harmony. The finish is cool, pure and simply doesn't stop. I could still taste this for a week afterwards and it was a though a residual portion of it was grafted on to a taste bud because every so often, I would get a flavor flash. Very curious in fact but nonetheless true. Like the Santenots, the '45 RC is a complete wine, capable of speaking to the soul, great but not flashy, sexy but not vulgar, regal but not austere, a living monument to the past yet serving as a model for future vintages and hence M. de Villaine's comment that the '45 represents the lost voice of Romanée-Conti. In summation, this is as close to what I imagine perfection to be as well as the greatest wine that I have ever drunk. Allen Meadows, Apr 10, 2008 |