The Monks, the Prince & the Patient Hand

The story begins, as Burgundy's best stories do, with monks. In 1232 the Abbey of Saint-Vivant de Vergy acquired some four acres of Pinot Noir vineyard in the village of Vosne, and for the next four hundred years the Benedictines farmed their walled cloux in silence — the same land, give or take a boundary stone, that the domaine farms today. In 1631 the vineyard passed to the Croonembourg family, who renamed it La Romanée for reasons history forgot to record, and bought the adjacent parcel already known as La Tâche — "the task," or "the stain." By the mid-eighteenth century the wine of La Romanée already cost more than anything else on the Côte.

Then came the auction that invented wine as legend. In 1760 the Croonembourg heirs put the vineyard up for sale, and two lifelong rivals went to war for it: Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, and the king's cousin, Louis-François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti. The mistress's pockets were not as deep as the prince's: he won, for the then-astronomical sum of 8,000 livres, appended his title to the vineyard — Romanée-Conti, forever after — and promptly withdrew every bottle from commerce, reserving the production for his own table and refusing to share it even with his closest friends. The Revolution confiscated the prince's land and auctioned it as biens nationaux; the vineyard passed through the hands of Napoleon's banker Julien Ouvrard before, in 1869, a seventy-nine-year-old négociant from Santenay named Jacques-Marie Duvault-Blochet bought it at auction and assembled, from Échézeaux, Grands Échézeaux and Richebourg, the estate the world now knows.

The twentieth century codified the myth. The trademark "Domaine de la Romanée-Conti" was registered in 1912; in 1933 the estate acquired the historic heart of La Tâche from the Liger-Belair family, fused it in 1936 with its own parcel of Les Gaudichots, and created the second monopole. In 1942, to keep the estate from being fragmented, the heirs formed the Société Civile du Domaine de la Romanée-Conti — half to the Gaudin de Villaine line, half sold to the négociant and family friend Henri Leroy, whose daughter Lalou Bize-Leroy would co-direct the domaine from 1974 to 1992. Montrachet arrived from 1963; Romanée-Saint-Vivant was leased from the Marey-Monge family in 1966 and bought outright in 1988, reuniting almost exactly the land the Priory of Saint-Vivant had held eleven centuries earlier. Corton followed by lease in 2008, Corton-Charlemagne in 2019. Today the domaine is co-directed by Bertrand de Villaine and Perrine Fenal — the sixth generation of the same two families, still fifty-fifty, still in the same small village.

The paradox of the world's most expensive wine is that almost nothing is done to it. The vineyards have been farmed organically since 1986 and, after seven years of quiet experimentation, entirely biodynamically since 2007 — horses ploughing the grand cru rows, preparations timed to the calendar, the soils treated as the single irreplaceable asset they are. The average vine is forty to fifty years old; every replacement comes by sélection massale from the domaine's own old-vine stock, preserving a genetic patrimony traced to Romanée-Conti's pre-phylloxera vines. Yields are kept brutally low by severe pruning — it is said at the domaine that three vines go into a single bottle — and the harvest is typically among the latest on the Côte, waiting for full phenolic ripeness rather than racing the rain.

In the cellar, the philosophy is classical to the point of austerity. The reds ferment with 100% whole clusters — stems included, as they have always been here — on indigenous yeasts, with a long vatting time and gentle extraction. Élevage takes place in 100% new oak, absorbed over many months until the wood disappears into the wine; there is no fining and no filtration. The crucial discipline is uniformity: every grand cru is vinified and raised in exactly the same way, so that the differences in the glass are the differences of the vineyards — Richebourg's muscle, Saint-Vivant's ether, La Tâche's spice, Romanée-Conti's ineffable completeness — and nothing else. Technique as eraser: the winemaker's signature is precisely the one thing you will never taste.

What results is the benchmark by which all Pinot Noir is quietly judged. The style unites the range — the stem inclusion, the new oak, the inimitable intensity of fruit born of minuscule yields and rigorous selection — yet the transparency of the wines lets each terroir state its own case, vintage after vintage. These are wines made for time: not just cellar time, but the slow time of a culture that replants a vine knowing the decision will outlive the person who made it. At this address, patience is not a virtue. It is the method.

The deepest legacy of the domaine is a legal one: the société civile of 1942, which bound two families — de Villaine and Leroy — into a single stewardship precisely so that no inheritance could ever carve the estate apart. It has worked for over eighty years. Lalou Bize-Leroy co-directed from 1974 to 1992; Henri-Frédéric Roch carried the Leroy side until his death in 2018; and Aubert de Villaine, who joined in 1965, became the conscience of not just the domaine but Burgundy itself — the man who led the long campaign that made the Climats de Bourgogne a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015. In January 2022 he stepped back to an advisory role, handing the co-direction to his nephew Bertrand de Villaine and to Perrine Fenal, Lalou's daughter. The names change; the pact holds. It remains, tellingly, the only domaine in France permitted by law to bear the name of a single vineyard.

The mythology has its own strange chapters. Richard Olney devoted an entire book to Romanée-Conti, the definitive monograph on a single vineyard. In 2010 the domaine received a ransom note threatening to poison the vines of its most precious parcel unless a million euros was paid — the would-be poisoner was caught, and the vines never knew. And the address itself carries the joke: the domaine stands near the rue du Temps Perdu — the "Street of Lost Time" — which is what awaits anyone who turns up hoping for a visit. Appointments are rarely granted; the wines do the receiving.

And then there is the market, where the domaine stands alone. In 2025, Burgundy accounted for 39% of Sotheby's wine auction sales — and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti alone accounted for 17%, including the year's most expensive lot anywhere: twelve bottles of Romanée-Conti 1990, sold in Hong Kong for $449,890. Yet the response from Vosne is the same as it has been since the Prince de Conti hoarded his barrels: no expansion, no second wine, no compromise — the same ~80,000 bottles, the same allocation list, the same horse in the same rows. The most famous wine in the world is still made by the least famous process there is: farming, patience, and time.