Romanee Conti: The World's Most Fabled Wine

by Richard Olney

A fabulous thing - mysterious, sensuous, transcendental, the greatest wine in the Dukedom of Burgundy..." So begins Richard Olney's marvelous book on Romanee-Conti, arguably the most highly regarded wine of all, a legend issued from a sliver of land barely thirty miles long. The strange and partly apocryphal history of the area stretches over 11 centuries; the larger than life characters who played it out and the very nature of the wine reads here like a historical novel set in a fabled time. Chapter by chapter, Olney explains the circumstances that make the wine great - the land, the micro climate, the grapes themselves. A particularly brilliant chapter is given over to a discussion of the wine at the table, with food. Menus are discussed, including one mounted at the Cafe Voisin on Christmas day in 1870, during the siege of Paris when the zoos were raided for food. The most practical aspect of this book must be the chapter Vintages, in which the notes of the world's leading wine critics - Michael Broadbent, Robert Parker and Serena Sutcliffe among others - are given for bottles going back to the early years of this century.

Genres: Wine

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 1995

About the author

Richard Olney was an American painter, cook, food writer, editor, and memoirist, best known for known for his books of French country cooking.

Olney lived in a house above the village of Solliès-Toucas in Provence, France, for most of his adult life, where he wrote many classic and influential cookbooks of French country cooking. He had first moved to France in 1951, to Paris, where he was close friends with (and painted many of) the American and English bohemian expatriate set, including James Baldwin, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, painter John Craxton, poet John Ashbery, and composer Ned Rorem.

He was also friends with Elizabeth David.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant read it talks about the rarest wine in the world or so "they called the wines of the millionaire, and drunk only by billionaire". An instructive story especially about Vosne La Romanee Conti, and La Tache how their winemaking differ. It says, that La Tache and Romanee Conti vie for the complexities, but they have different complexities.

As for La Tache it contained within svelte, lean, sinewy, and aloof body while Romanee Conti is fuller, more spherical, it has the feel of volumes, it is more voluptuous. It is very informative to anyone who value grand bottles of wine. Romanee Conti is the most regarded wine in the Dukedom of Burgundy, and all over the world.