DRC 2003s – and 2001s in bottle

Last week I had a chance to taste Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s red offerings from the generally extremely varied 2003 vintage and enjoyed it enormously (considerably more than my tasting of the 2001s last sep, also detailed below). All the 2003 wines tasted notably autumnal to me but were not plagued by the besetting sins of 2003s generally: an excess of alcohol, a lack of flavour and/or a raspingly dry finish.
 
Aubert de Villaine confessed that he literally became ill with the difficulty of the crucial decisoin of when to pick and spent three days in bed in late...