Australian white burgundy that is…
Now what about Domaine de la Romanée-Conti? You don’t see too much critique of the domaine as people are probably too worried that they might ‘lose’ their allocations of wine, but I think I will (eventually) raise a valid point here.
I took delivery of a modest 4 bottles of DRC 05 last week. I’m not sure why I decidied to open the package, maybe it was just to see if the labels were solid gold to reflect market pricing – the answer was yes, and no, one of the bottles was indeed gold – a gold-topped bottle of Montrachet, the thing is I didn’t order one…
The Montrachet was mistakenly in the package in place of a more modest bottle of Echézeaux. Now it was time to test the system! I could have said nothing, but that’s not my style, so I sent a mail saying that my Echézeaux was missing, but as they now (theoretically) note the bottle number at the side of the customer name (more on this later), my bottle should still be in their store – I didn’t mention the ‘gold-top’ in my cellar. It took a couple of days, but the merchant came back and said, “We have checked everything and found out, that you got one bottle of Montrachet (bottle Nr. 1044) instead of the Echézeaux”. They went on to say that if I sent back ‘my’ ‘gold-top’ I could have my Echézeaux!
I have no problem with the above, it’s how it should have been, but I find it interesting that the domaine’s ‘big brother’ approach to sales seems (at least in part!) to work – i.e. the referencing of bottles to their purchaser. The domaine’s clear intention is to try and restrict resale to get the bottles into the hands of drinkers rather than traders i.e. by threatening (maybe ‘implying’ is a better choice of word) not to sell again to people who are found to offload their wines for profit within weeks of purchase. I personally feel – to some extent – that this is a good thing, but I also see a sense of irony here: Domaine de la Romanée-Conti has a pricing level based significantly on the history of tradeability for the wines. If the wines were not so tradeable, then the domaine’s pricing might be only 30-40% of current pricing so ultimately they would be less financially successful…