2019 Louis Latour Les Quatre Journaux Romanee-Saint-Vivant Grand Cru Burgundy 750 ml

One of the most sacred Pinot Noir vineyards on Earth has produced a work of perfection. 

Layered and graceful, gorgeous now but capable of aging for decades, the 2019 Louis Latour Romanée-Saint-Vivant Les Quatre Journaux is a moving bottle of Grand Cru Burgundy. James Suckling gave it a flawless 100-point score, which landed it at #8 on his Top 100 Wines of 2021. In his glowing review, he said it’s “the essence” of fine Burgundy: “enormously concentrated, but so graceful, this makes you want to forget everything else you are supposed to be doing.” 

Latour’s parcel in Romanée-Saint-Vivant, le Clos des Quatre Journaux, is located in the appellation’s southwestern corner, its first row of vines separated from the Grand Cru Romanée-Conti ($28,500) by a narrow tractor path. Maison Louis Latour acquired it 1898. A journal is an old Burgundian measurement of land equal to 0.4 hectares, about one acre. Since that purchase 120 years ago, Latour sold half of their stake in the vineyard, reducing their holdings from quatre to deux journaux—just two acres, enough for around 250 cases of wine for the world.

Despite its size, this modest parcel of iron-rich clay yields what is now undoubtedly Latour’s grandest red wine. Clive Coates MW calls Romanée-Saint-Vivant the most elegant of the Vosne-Romanée Grands Crus, saying it is “an exquisitely perfumed wine, silk where Richebourg is velvet, but no less intense, no less beautiful.” Powerfully aromatic, with both finesse and puissance, this gorgeous 2019 will, for more than two decades into the future, stand as gorgeous evidence of why Louis Latour claimed this plot more than a century ago.