Domaine d'Auvenay

The Free Bacchus Story

In 2019 heat and drought left Lalou Bize-Leroy with a single barrel of most of her Domaine d’Auvenay wines, and under 100 litres of Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet. She laughed about it over lunch with visiting merchants. Her yields were among the lowest she had ever seen, she told them, and she was delighted with the quality.

Burgundy knows her for other names. She was co-director of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the region’s benchmark estate, from 1974 to 1992; she founded Domaine Leroy in Vosne-Romanée with purchases in 1988 and 1989; and her great-grandfather founded the family merchant house, Maison Leroy, in 1868. Auvenay is separate from all of them, and it is a farm, an old property high on the plateau above Saint-Romain whose records go back to 1180. While she made the wine, the Burgundy writer Clive Coates wrote, her husband, Marcel Bize, ran the farm, biodynamically of course. He died in 2004. It still grows more than grapes. Ecocert’s certificate lists wheat, rye, triticale, two kinds of spelt, buckwheat, sunflower and clover beside the vines, all of them organic.

She put the vineyard together a parcel at a time. To the vines in Auxey-Duresses and Meursault she had inherited from her father she added Puligny-Montrachet Les Folatières in 1989, a sliver of Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet in 1990, Chevalier-Montrachet in 1992, and two red grands crus, Bonnes-Mares and Mazis-Chambertin, in 1993 and 1994. Coates puts the total at about four hectares, spread by Wine Spectator’s count across six villages, and since 1988 the domaine has made between 350 and 500 cases a year of all its wines together.

White Burgundy is Chardonnay, the same grape that makes Chablis further north, lean and stony. Burgundy ranks its vineyards, and grand cru is the highest rank a site can hold. Chevalier-Montrachet is one of five grands crus on the hill of Montrachet above the village of Puligny-Montrachet, at the southern end of the Côte de Beaune, and the highest of them, on thin soils of marl and limestone, with forest above it and the grands crus Montrachet and Bâtard-Montrachet below. The whole vineyard is about 18 acres, split among a crowd of famous names, Domaine Leflaive, Louis Jadot and Ramonet among them, and d’Auvenay’s share is 0.4 acres. Wines from these slopes can age and improve for decades. Bize-Leroy keeps her yields low, lets the grapes’ own yeasts do the fermenting and matures the wine in new oak barrels. Wine Spectator’s Bruce Sanderson found her 2006 Chevalier-Montrachet rich and creamy, opulent even. The wines can be strong. She told Stephen Brook of Decanter that her 2008 Chevalier-Montrachet came in at 16% alcohol, and assured him that you don’t notice it. In 2018 Wine Advocate gave the 2015 Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru 100 points.

Auvenay signed on with Ecocert, the organic certifier, on 15 March 1995, the same day as Domaine Leroy. Its certificate names the wines from the 1999 vintage, as made from organic grapes until 2011, the most a European wine could claim before rules for organic winemaking arrived in 2012, and as organic wine since. Nothing older is on it, and it names no red from 2004. The newest vines, a little Bâtard-Montrachet and the village Puligny-Montrachet Les Enseignères, came in 2011, and the certificate lists their 2013s as in conversion. Biodynamics is practised here, not certified; neither Demeter nor Biodyvin lists the domaine.