Not to Be Confused: Three Neighbouring and Distinct Romanée
This is the most frequent confusion in the Burgundian vineyard, and it deserves to be cleared up at once. La Romanée is not the Romanée-Conti: these are two distinct grand cru appellations, separated by a footpath, farmed by two different owners — the Romanée-Conti (1.8 ha) is the monopole of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, La Romanée (0.845 ha) that of Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair. La Romanée lies upslope, above its neighbour.
Nor is it the Romanée-Saint-Vivant, the third appellation to bear that name in the same commune: the latter is appreciably larger, shared among several owners, and set much lower on the slope, right down to the edges of the village. Its geological formations are moreover not those of the other grands crus of Vosne. Three neighbouring names, three terroirs, three statuses of ownership: the label says exactly what it says.
A Band of Hillside of Less Than a Hectare
La Romanée is inscribed within a narrow rectangle at the heart of the Vosne-Romanée slope. It is bordered downslope, to the east, by the Romanée-Conti; upslope, to the west, by the premier cru Aux Reignots; to the south by La Grande Rue; to the north by the Richebourg. The footpath that separates it from the Romanée-Conti bears, moreover, a name that long designated the climat itself: "Au Sentier du Prêtre".
Facing east like most of the grands crus of the Côte de Nuits, it is tiered between 268 and 280 metres in altitude, that is a dozen metres of drop on a continuous and marked gradient — of the order of 10 to 12% according to the surveys, at the limit between moderate and steep. That is appreciably steeper than the Romanée-Conti, which shows only about 7%.
The Terroir: Little Earth on the Prémeaux Limestone
On so small an area, the geology comes down to two formations: clayey limestone in the lower part of the climat, the Prémeaux limestone in its upper part. Jean-François Bazin sums up the soil in a few words: a rendzina resting on the Prémeaux limestone and the oolith, with a brown limestone soil at the top; little earth, and stony.
The comparison with the neighbour is enlightening. Clive Coates describes a soil structure close to that of the Romanée-Conti — a fine mixture of sand and clay, poor in sand, mixed with stones, over a friable Prémeaux limestone — but with an appreciably lesser soil depth, and a smaller share of clay. More gradient, less earth, more stone: the difference in style between the two crus reads first of all in this leanness.
Climate and Exposure
The climate is that of the Côte de Nuits, temperate with a slight continental tendency: pronounced winters, wet springs subject to frost, hot summers punctuated by storms. Pinot noir ripens there in the first period, and the cahier des charges imposes a minimum ripeness corresponding to 11.5% potential alcohol as well as a planting density of at least 9,000 vines per hectare.
The due east exposure and the pronounced gradient give the climat rapid drainage and a clear morning warming. The counterpart of this leanness is a heightened sensitivity to water stress in dry vintages, and volumes that remain, whatever happens, minute: fewer than four thousand bottles a year for the entire world market.
The Style of the Wines
Burgundian tradition places La Romanée immediately alongside its neighbour. Camille Rodier called it "a little fuller-bodied and more virile than the Romanée-Conti, with the same supreme elegance". Remington Norman and Charles Taylor describe it as powerful and delicate at once, deep, with silky tannins and a long finish.
Thierry Mantoux details its aromatic register: a very elegant and fleshy palate, of great persistence, on cherry, black berries — blackcurrant, blackberry — spice and undergrowth; with age come candied notes, leather and the aromas of ageing. It is a wine for long keeping, and power goes here together with volume, which explains why tasters often speak of its richness rather than of its immediate finesse.
Six Parcels, a General, and Two Centuries of Liger-Belair
The climat has not always borne this name. It appears in the archives under the successive designations "Es Échanges" (1602), "Es Échanges, Au Sentier du Prêtre" (1664), "Au Sentier du Prêtre" and "Au-dessus de la Romanée" (1769), then "Échanges" (1771); an official document of 1790 speaks for the first time of two of these parcels as being "En La Romanée". The climat was then made up of six small parcels belonging to different owners, one of which was held by the Cistercians, and whose crop probably went in part into cuvées sold under the name of Richebourg.
The Liger-Belair name appears in 1815, when General Count Louis Liger-Belair married Claire-Cécile Basire, widow of another general who owned fine vines at Vosne. From 1815 to 1826 he bought back the six parcels one by one — the "Gauthier" in 1818, the "Gillot" in 1820, the "Lamy de Samerey", the vine of the Pères de l'Oratoire of Dijon, and the "Royer" and "Ménétrier" parcels in 1826 — until a monopole had been reconstituted; the whole was registered in the cadastre as a single parcel, under the name La Romanée, as early as 1827.
From the 1933 Auction to the Return of the Estate
The family patrimony was broken up in 1933: after the death of Count Henri Liger-Belair in 1924 and then of his widow in 1931, the law requiring all heirs to be of age in order to settle an estate, and two of the ten children being minors, the vines were sold at judicial auction at the town hall of Vosne-Romanée on 31 August 1933 — La Tâche de Bévy as well as La Romanée. It was one of the sons, Just Liger-Belair, then aged twenty-nine and a curate at Dijon, who bought La Romanée at auction, against René Engel.
The climat then remained farmed under métayage for nearly seventy years: first by the Michaudet family, then, from the early 1950s, by the Forey family, over three generations, the owner's share being marketed through the merchant trade — latterly by Bouchard Père et Fils. Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair, refounded by Louis-Michel Liger-Belair, took the family vines back into direct farming from 2000, and brought in La Romanée in 2002. Wikipedia, for its part, places the beginning of this progressive recovery in 1991, at the death of Canon Just: the precise chronology of the transition varies according to the sources.