Madame Bize-Leroy
A négoce from 1868, a domaine from 1988, and one person at the helm.
Two estates and one of the great cellars of France, all of them still in the hands of the woman who has shaped fine Burgundy more than anyone else in living memory.
At a glance
BASED IN
Vosne-Romanée and Auxey-Duresses
Côte de Nuits and Côte de Beaune
FOUNDED
1868 and 1988
The Maison, then the Domaine
UNDER VINE
Just under twenty-two hectares
Trellised high, the canopy braided rather than hedged since 1999
FARMING
Biodynamic since 1988
Every parcel from the first year, no trial plot
THE CUVÉES
30
Nine Grands Crus, eight Premiers Crus, nine Villages, four regional
The story
A family, a house, a vision
It begins in Auxey-Duresses in 1868, with a grower who decided to stop selling through an agent and sell his wine himself. It runs through his grandson Henri, who made a fortune in cognac and spent a great deal of it in 1942 keeping Romanée-Conti in one piece. And then there is Madame Bize-Leroy, handed the family négoce at twenty-three, who went down into the cellars and never really came back up.
Henri Leroy bought his half of Romanée-Conti in 1942, when the estate was in trouble and no one else would. His daughter took the family négoce at twenty-three and ran the commercial side of Romanée-Conti for eighteen years alongside Aubert de Villaine, while the two families argued, quietly at first, about what the wines should be.
La qualité, c’est les rendements.
Quality is a question of yield. Madame Bize-Leroy
In 1988 she bought the Charles Noellat estate in Vosne-Romanée, converted every parcel to biodynamics in its first year, and started bottling under her own name. Domaine Leroy has not made a wine any other way since.
In July 2026 the Michelin Guide published its first ranking of Burgundy estates, awarding three grappes, its highest mark, to nine of them. Two of the nine were hers: Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay. She was ninety-four, and still at her post every morning.
LALOU BIZE-LEROY
Domaine Leroy
Vineyard and cellar
In the vineyard
Madame Bize-Leroy went biodynamic across every parcel in 1988, the domaine’s first year, with no trial plot and no gradual conversion. The pruning is severe, so that each vine carries only a few bunches and puts everything it has into them. The soil is worked by horse. Yields come in far below what the appellation allows, and at harvest as many as forty people sort the fruit twice.
In the cellar
Madame Bize-Leroy does not call herself a winemaker. The wine makes itself, she says, and the cellar’s job is to do as little to it as possible. The fruit is never destemmed or crushed, though it does not go in whole either: every bunch is cut back and resized by hand before it reaches the vat. Fermentation runs in wooden vats built to each parcel, on native yeasts, with the cap worked by foot.
The cuvées and their terroirs
Nine Grands Crus, eight Premiers Crus, nine Villages
Nine Grands Crus, eight Premiers Crus, nine Villages, across just under twenty-two hectares. The names run through the summit of the Côte: Musigny, Chambertin, Richebourg, Romanée-Saint-Vivant. Whatever the classification on the label, each one is farmed the same way.
Grand Cru
Chambertin
+
Latricières-Chambertin
+
Clos de la Roche
+
Musigny
+
Clos de Vougeot
+
Romanée-Saint-Vivant
+
Richebourg
+
Corton Renardes
+
Corton-Charlemagne
White
+
Premier Cru
Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru Les Combottes
+
Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru Les Charmes
+
Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Les Beaux Monts
+
Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru Aux Brûlées
+
Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Aux Boudots
+
Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Aux Vignerondes
+
Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Les Narbantons
+
Volnay 1er Cru Santenots du Milieu
+
Villages
Gevrey-Chambertin
+
Chambolle-Musigny Les Fremières
+
Vosne-Romanée Genaivrières
+
Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Allots
+
Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Lavières
+
Nuits-Saint-Georges Bas de Combe
+
Pommard Les Vignots
+
Pommard Les Trois Follots
+
Auxey-Duresses Les Lavières
White
+
Regional
Bourgogne Blanc
White
+
Bourgogne Rouge
+
Bourgogne Aligoté
White
+
Coteaux Bourguignons Blanc et Rouge
+
A closer look
Behind the breakup at Romanée-Conti
For Aubert de Villaine
✗✗✗✗
For Madame Bize-Leroy
✗✗✗✗
The ninth vote
The ninth vote belonged to Pauline Roch, her elder sister.
The board met on 15 January 1992.
In February 1993 the Wine Spectator ran a long investigative piece on what had happened at Romanée-Conti the January before. It drew on both sides, on private letters between the two families, and on the court records, and it has never been put online. It remains the fullest account in print of an argument that ran through three generations before it finally broke.
Critical reception
The case the wines have made for themselves
Three of the most demanding palates in the trade have spent three decades writing about these wines. Between Burghound, the Wine Advocate and Vinous they have published close to fifteen hundred reviews since the founding vintage of 1988.
1,500
reviews since 1988
100
wines at 98 points or above
17
perfect 100-point scores
96
average for the Musigny
There is no more ardent exponent of the most fundamental of all Burgundian values, the concept of terroir, than Madame Bize-Leroy.
Antonio Galloni · 2012
As seems to be the case every year, Leroy has fashioned some incredible wines, many of which are the reference standards for their respective appellations.
Allen Meadows · Burghound · 2002
Bize-Leroy is making wines not for the present, but for eternity.
William Kelley · Wine Advocate · 2024
Maison Leroy
The story and the method
Gardien des Grands Millésimes
The Maison is the older of the two businesses, and it works the other way round from the Domaine. It grows nothing. It buys wine already made, from growers across Burgundy, and then holds it, sometimes for decades, until it is ready to drink. Gardien des Grands Millésimes, keeper of the great vintages, is a plain description of the job.
The vinothèque underneath Auxey-Duresses is the point of the whole thing. Bottles go in and are left, sometimes for thirty or forty years, in a cellar that has never been sold down or broken up. Very few houses in Burgundy could afford to hold stock that long. Fewer still would want to.
The collection
Once a year, the great vintages
The Maison releases once a year, and calls it the Collection. The choosing begins each September and runs four months. Some years there is a theme to it: in a year ending in five, she might put out older vintages ending in five. These are mature wines the house has been holding, in some cases for decades, waiting for them to come right.
A single release sheet can carry a wine of five years and a wine of forty, because both, in her judgement, are drinking as they should. Nothing is held back for a better market and nothing is pushed out early. The Collection is built fresh each year around whatever the cellar says is ready.
In person
A bottle of 1926 Auxey-Duresses
In October 2019 I bought a case of 1926 Auxey-Duresses at a small auction house near Villefranche-sur-Saône. I knew where the bottles had come from, by way of Paul Bocuse, and a few months later I was opening one at Madame Bize-Leroy’s table above Saint-Romain. The vines that made it are long gone but the memories remain.
The bottles had come to that auction from Paul Bocuse’s own cellar, and the case still carried his seal: three Michelin stars since 1965. Madame Bize-Leroy had known him for decades, from the tastings at d’Auvenay in the sixties and seventies where Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers and Jacques Puisais sat at the same table. The 1926 was a small, difficult year, and she remembered it. We opened one above Saint-Romain, in a room lined with books and religious art, and drank a wine made by her great-grandfather’s house sixty years before she took it over.
I hope to spend many more afternoons in her company. Even though I do not expect to sit down to another bottle quite like that one.
Corentin Margier
A Note from Terroirs
There is a tendency, in the fine wine trade, to use the word singular too freely. There is no fine wine producer alive, however, of whom it is more accurately said than Madame Bize-Leroy. Domaine Leroy has, since 1988, made a body of work that has no parallel in modern Burgundy. Maison Leroy has, since 1868, and since 1955 under her hand, built a library of mature Burgundy that no one else in the region has, and has released its wines to the world on a principle that almost no other house in any region still follows.
We are honoured to have been entrusted by the houses, and we are looking after what they have given us with the care it deserves. The allocations are small. The conversations about which bottles go where are real ones, and we are happy to have them with anyone who is building a serious cellar. These are the wines of a working life. We are glad to bring them to the UK, and we hope you will let us put them on your table.
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