Domaine de la Romanée-Conti

The Free Bacchus Story

The Romanée-Conti vineyard covers 1.8 hectares. That's roughly two and a half football pitches, and it produces around 5,000 bottles a year for the entire world.

The domaine stopped using synthetic treatments in 1985 and took Biodyvin biodynamic certification in 2016/17. The order matters: three decades of practice came first, and the certificate arrived afterwards to document something already established. Very few estates can show that sequence.

The domaine leaves roughly a third of the permitted crop on the vine every year, taking about 25 hectolitres a hectare against a grand cru maximum of 35, on the most valuable agricultural land in the world.

Wine Advocate has awarded perfect scores across multiple vintages. There is no realistic sense in which most people will buy this wine, and we would rather say so than pretend the listing is a shopping recommendation.

It earns its place for a narrower reason. When someone argues that biodynamic farming is a marketing device or a compromise on quality, the most expensive and most scrutinised wine on earth has been farmed this way for forty years. That's a difficult fact to work around.