Wine, like baseball playing cards, has its hierarchies: For instance, it was a universal truth in my longago youth that two Roger Marises were always worth one Mickey Mantle.

For its part, wine reaches its pinnacle of esteem with Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Wine collectors everywhere will trade two or more of just about any other wine in exchange for one of this estate’s top bottles.

Partly this is a function of price. DRC (as this estate is breezily abbreviated) offers seven named-vineyard wines under its hallowed name, all grands crus the red wines (pinot noir) of Échézeaux, Grands Échézeaux, Romanée St. Vivant, Richebourg, La Tâche, and the namesake Romanée-Conti, along with Burgundy’s most acclaimed white wine (chardonnay), Montrachet.

Each of these wines sells for a different price. Échézeaux, for example, is the relative bargain of the bunch. You can pick up the superb 2001 DRC Échézeaux for about $300 to $350 a bottle. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It isn’t when you’re told that the 2001 La Tâche — which is a monopole, or exclusively owned vineyard of DRC, and one of the world’s greatest red wines — goes for between $1,200 and $1,400 a bottle. The rarest wine of all, the 4.44-acre Romanée-Conti, also a monopole, fetches between $5,000 and $6,000 a bottle.

Moralists routinely deride such prices, sanctimoniously intoning that no wine could justify them. They, of course, are joyless Philistines. It’s like saying that no car could possibly deserve the asking price of a Ferrari when there’s a perfectly good Chevrolet to take you to the supermarket.

While DRC’s prices always attract attention — indeed, it’s impossible to write about them without mentioning this feature — the fact is that wine fanciers are fools only for wine love. Even the richest will not part with such money if there’s nothing soul stirring within the bottle.

DRC gets its prices because it delivers the goods. This was brought home to me yet again in two tastings conducted by the 67-year-old co-director of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Aubert de Villaine, in Melbourne, Australia. You would think that an estate as famed as DRC would not have to hawk its wares, but Mr. de Villaine, whose first vintage at DRC was 1962, knows better. His is not just a luxury product, but also very nearly a myth.

“I don’t want the wines of the Domaine to be collected and stored away only to be sold and resold,” he said. “They should be drunk with a meal and enjoyed with friends. Our wines are made for food, not just tasting.” He travels the world, presenting his wines to select groups, mostly in the trade, letting the wines do the convincing about their intrinsic worth.

The two tastings did that neat trick yet again: Tasting the not-yetreleased 2004s on two separate occasions reinforced just how commanding this estate was in what was a very difficult vintage — you wouldn’t know it tasting DRC’s wines.

The 2004 Échézeaux was a stunner, with a deep, bright, blackishgarnet hue, and a rich, intense scent of wild cherries and gaminess with a lovely textural density and lingering aftertaste. In comparison, many other 2004s are already showing premature aging. Given the fact that Échézeaux is always DRC’s least expensive and earliest maturing wine, it will be the deal of the portfolio when released.

The 2004 Grands Échézeaux is always a deeper, more long-lived wine than its eponymous neighbor — that’s why it long ago got the “grand” designation. Denser, deeper, more tightly furled and possessed of a certain solidity, it needs more time to blossom compared to the lithe Échézeaux.

Romanée St. Vivant 2004, a famously perfumed wine, lived up to its traditional image, offering an almost opiate spiciness and exquisite finesse. It is a wine of seduction, if ever Bacchus created one.

The 2004 Richebourg was a disappointment, however, as it was a bit dilute in the mid-palate (think of a candy with a hard center and you’ve got the idea of the midpalate).

But the 2004 La Tâche was simply brilliant: dense, opulent, with a hard-candy mid-palate and a rapturous array of scents and tastes that somehow seamlessly blend the Balanchine-like elegance and finesse of the Romanée St. Vivant with the density and muscular virility of the Grands Échézeaux.

The ability of these wine to age was reinforced when the 2004 Richebourg and 2004 La Tâche were compared side by side with the 1996, 1991, and 1990 vintages of these same vineyards. While the Richebourg has undeniable breed, really, it’s La Tâche that can bring the word “miracle” to the lips — or at least the palate — of even a confirmed atheist. Wines like these are rarefied experiences. They have their price, but cannot be measured by it.