Domaine Leroy

The Free Bacchus Story

Lalou Bize-Leroy assembled the domaine from the Charles Noëllat vines in Vosne-Romanée in 1988, added the Philippe Rémy parcels in Gevrey-Chambertin a year later, and farmed it biodynamically from the start — while she was still co-director of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Grand cru Burgundy had almost no precedent for that at the time.

The arithmetic tells you the rest. About twenty-two hectares, most of it premier and grand cru, with production usually put at around 40,000 bottles a year. That is a very small quantity of wine off a very large amount of classified land, and the gap is yields cut far below what the appellation permits. The severity of the farming is the entire proposition here; there is no volume anywhere in the model to soften a bad decision.

Certification is Ecocert organic, held since March 1995. The biodynamics dates from 1988 and has never been certified at all.

There is a story about 1993, a wet vintage on the Côte d’Or, in which she watched the mildew arrive and refused to spray. She tells it differently, and has more than once. The domaine did spray, with the copper and sulphur biodynamics allows, but clay in the water blocked the sprayer’s nozzles and the treatment never properly went on.

She made seven hundred litres of Romanée-Saint-Vivant from a hectare that year. What she refused was synthetic chemistry, not treatment, and the legend had quietly swapped one for the other. A domaine with this reputation attracts stories that harden into fact by repetition.