The wine in this lot has a score of 96 from Robert Parker and the following tasting note -While the 2017 La Tâche Grand Cru is one of the most approachable recent vintages of this great monopole, it's still really too soon to be opening bottles. However, these things happen, and it's certainly a striking wine, unwinding in the glass with detailed aromas of wild berries, plums, exotic spices, orange, rose petals, peony and coniferous forest floor. Full-bodied, satiny and seamless, its beautifully refined tannins and succulent acids are cloaked in an ample core of fruit. Like many of the best 2017s, its charm is deceptive, as there's a lot waiting in reserve here, and even a few years' patience will bear dividends. A morning spent with Aubert de Villaine provided an opportunity to taste the domaine's 2016 and 2017 vintages. From bottle, the 2016s are stunning, equalling or surpassing the profound 2015s. There is a vibrancy and weightless intensity to the wines that mark them out as very special indeed. When the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti produces a great vintage, there's nothing like it in Burgundy, and 2016 is a legitimately great vintage at this address. On the way to our tasting, we passed by the domaine's entire stock of 2016 Echézeaux and Grands-Echézeaux, bottled entirely in magnum. Those wines won't be released in early 2019- "perhaps we'll drink them, or release them later, we haven't decided", said de Villaine, pointing to a stack of bottles that would nonetheless elicit green envy in any other producer of those two appellations.