Domaine de la Romanee Conti Romanée St. Vivant 2019

The 2019 Romanee St. Vivant Grand Cru picks up where the Grands Echezeaux leaves off. What a wine! Complete and beautifully resonant, the Romanee St. Vivant offers up copious dark fruit intermingled with dried herbs, lavender, graphite and coffee. It's a rich, dramatic Romanee St. Vivant that will reward decades of cellaring. In most years, Romanee St. Vivant is a wine of sensuality, but in 2019 it is quite brooding and potent in bearing. Magnificent.

The 2019 Romanée-St-Vivant Grand Cru wafts from the glass with breathtaking aromas of raspberries and strawberries mingled with bergamot, Indian spices, peonies and rose petals. Full-bodied, vibrant and perfumed, it's finer boned than the more muscular Grands-Échézeaux, with a bright spine of acidity and beautifully refined tannins, concluding with a long, penetrating finish. Striking for its purity and elegance, my handwritten notes include the phrase "pure sensuality."