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The world-famous Romanée-Conti vineyard in Burgundy |
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Read Our Story |
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Click to download Rocky Book pdf |
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Listening
to the master. After trying for three years to visit Romanée-Conti,
I finally received a private tour from Aubert de Villaine, the owner
of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), which makes the most
expensive red burgundy in the world, Romanée-Conti ($1,695
per bottle at the 2002 release).
Although our American Pinot Noir is different from French Burgundies,
as we optimize them for the soils and climate in California, we have
taken the winemaking process used at DRC as the baseline for how we
make wine. Others de-stem the grape berries prior to fermentation,
but the DRC ferments whole clusters. Our experimentation at Clos de
la Tech showed that whole clusters (which reduce the amount of seed
tannin in the wine and increase the amount of stem tannin in the wine)
make bigger wines with rounder, softer tannin. The DRC uses native
(field) yeast to ferment.
We also do not add refined yeast to the fermentation and prefer the
complexity of the natural fermentation in which several varieties
of native field yeasts ferment the wine.
We use the same barrel maker
as does DRC, François Fréres, from the town of Saint
Romain in Burgundy. We also prefer our oak from the Bertrange forest
in central France, because of its very understated oak flavor, which
allows us to use all new barrels for every harvest without over-oaking
the wine. Like DRC, we also bottle our wine by gravity with no filtration.
Although we do use high technology to monitor the grapes during the
growing season and the wine during fermentation and barrel-aging,
we never deviate from the basic Burgundian “recipe” that was firmly established in the 1830s, unless that
new technology dramatically improves the wine (for example, our fully
automated, but very gentle wine press—patent pending).
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