A closer look
A CLOSER LOOK
Behind the Breakup at Romanée-Conti
In February 1993, The Wine Spectator published a long investigative report by its European correspondent Per-Henrik Mansson on the rupture that had taken place at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti the previous January. It is the fullest account of the affair ever set down in print, drawing on interviews with both sides, private correspondence between the two families, and contemporary court records. It is not available online. What follows is drawn directly from the printed pages.
The headline version, then and since, is that Madame Bize-Leroy was voted out as co-director of DRC over a dispute about how its wines were being sold. The fuller story is one of two families at odds about how Burgundy’s most famous wines should be made and shown to the world, and of an argument that ran through three generations before it broke open in 1992.
Act I: What Maison Leroy was doing for DRC?
Through the 1950s and 1960s, DRC routinely held back certain wines from the market in vintages it considered below its standard. The wines were sold in cask to Maison Leroy at a price that kept the DRC shareholders in stable income. Henri Leroy never bottled them under the Leroy name. He sold them on to other négociants, who bottled them under their own labels and released them into the trade at much lower prices than DRC’s own wines would have commanded.
In 1950 and 1951, only La Tâche was released under the DRC label. In 1960, only La Tâche and Romanée-Conti. No Echezeaux in 1963 or 1965. In 1968, no reds at all. For two decades the arrangement worked for both sides. DRC kept its reputation immaculate. Maison Leroy carried the rest of the production.
Madame Bize-Leroy put a stop to this in the early 1970s. She told her father, and she told DRC’s board, that Maison Leroy would no longer pay full price for wines DRC was unwilling to put under its own label. Faced with the loss of the buyer that had been clearing its weakest vintages for two decades, DRC began to release them itself. In 1973, 1974, 1975 and 1977, almost everything was bottled, including wines the estate had previously held back. The 1977s were recalled when clients complained of a bacterial problem. The Mansson article quotes both Aubert de Villaine and Madame Bize-Leroy admitting they were embarrassed those wines had gone out at all. In the decade before she founded Domaine Leroy, the quality gap between DRC under the de Villaine watch and Maison Leroy under hers had already become audible to anyone tasting the two side by side. The reason it had not been audible earlier is that Maison Leroy had spent twenty years making sure it wasn’t.
Act II: The Revue des Vins de France Tasting
The first open shot came around 1972, when Henri de Villaine opened his copy of La Revue du Vin de France and read a report from a tasting Madame Bize-Leroy had organised at her own home four months earlier. The writer had set Maison Leroy bottlings against DRC across the line-up, and the result was on the page in black and white. A notable feature of the tasting, the writer reported, was how easily the Maison Leroy wines, from her village Vosne-Romanée up through her 1er Crus Les Suchots and Aux Beaux Monts, had held their own against the DRC Romanée-Conti, Richebourg and La Tâche.
Henri de Villaine fired off a furious letter to Auxey-Duresses. “Unbelievable,” he opened. He could not understand why one of DRC’s co-owners, who was also the agent for the domaine, had put on a tasting that left the impression that DRC’s most expensive Grand Crus were no better than her own village wine. He called for the immediate re-examination of Maison Leroy’s exclusive distribution rights to the DRC wines. Henri Leroy wrote back. Why had Henri de Villaine not paused to think before writing something so mean-spirited? After everything Maison Leroy had done for DRC over the decades, after the prestige the négoce had given the domaine, the attack was unacceptable. The two patriarchs would never recover from the exchange. The de Villaines would carry the grievance for another eighteen years before they could finally act on it.
Act III: The Judgment of Paris
The next embarrassment came on 24 May 1976, when Aubert de Villaine accepted an invitation from a young English merchant named Steven Spurrier to sit on the jury of a blind tasting at the Hôtel Intercontinental in Paris. The white flight set six California Chardonnays against four white Burgundies: the 1973 Meursault-Charmes from Domaine Roulot, the 1973 Beaune Clos des Mouches from Drouhin, the 1973 Bâtard-Montrachet from Ramonet-Prudhon, and the 1972 Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles from Domaine Leflaive. Aubert was on the jury alongside Odette Kahn, editor of the same Revue du Vin de France that had carried the Maison Leroy article four years earlier. Spurrier had not warned the jurors that California wines would be in the line-up. The winning white was the 1973 Château Montelena Chardonnay from Napa Valley, made by Mike Grgich, scoring 132 points against the Roulot Meursault’s 126.5. The Roulot came second, the Drouhin Beaune Clos des Mouches fifth, the Bâtard-Montrachet seventh, the Pucelles eighth. Three of the top four whites were Californian.
Henri Leroy was apoplectic. He saw at once what would happen. When Frank Prial reported the result in The New York Times a few weeks later, every bottle of Château Montelena left in New York stock sold out within days. Henri Leroy wrote to the widow of Aubert’s late uncle Jean de Villaine, demanding that Aubert be removed as co-director of DRC. He was not removed. But a private letter that Aubert had written to his own father six years earlier, on 9 February 1970, surfaced in the file Henri Leroy was assembling at his Paris lawyer’s office. In that letter, Aubert had written that a domaine of DRC’s prestige should not be sold through a négociant house at all, and that the system in which he was working could not be defended. “I do not believe in my work,” Aubert had written. By the time Madame Bize-Leroy took the co-direction with him in 1974, he had already, in writing and to his own family, repudiated the partnership.
Act IV: The Grey Market
By the late 1980s, the commercial gap between Madame Bize-Leroy’s wines and DRC’s had become large enough that DRC’s own American agent was about to be undone by it. In 1988, Domaine Leroy bottled its first vintage. In 1989, DRC released its 1988s. The mixed cases the estate sold contained one bottle of Romanée-Conti at $260, three of La Tâche at $200 each, two of Richebourg at $180, two of Romanée-Saint-Vivant at $160, a Grands Echezeaux at $140 and three Echezeaux at $100 each. Lamy de la Chapelle, a California broker who held the Société Leroy rights to distribute DRC in Japan, began routing Romanée-Conti through Takashimaya in Tokyo and back into the European trade at four to five times the DRC price. He sold the rest of the mixed-case wines into London. The principal buyer was Stephen Browett, then thirty-three, co-owner of Farr Vintners, working at the time out of the basement of his remodelled Pimlico house. Farr was already a serious player in the London auction trade. Browett took DRC wines off de la Chapelle at well below DRC’s official prices, and on-sold them into the United States to importers ready to undercut Wilson-Daniels, DRC’s authorised American agent. By the spring of 1991, DRC’s regulated US market had collapsed. Wilson-Daniels threatened to sue DRC. The board needed to act.
Act V: The Vote
The vote came at a DRC board meeting on 15 January 1992. The board had nine members. Aubert had four on his side. Lalou had four on hers. The deciding vote was held by her own elder sister Pauline Roch, who owned the other half of the Leroy family’s stake in DRC and had never been close to her. Pauline voted against her. The motion passed five to four. Marcel Bize, present in the room as a director of Leroy SA, defended her position when she was barred from speaking, and threatened legal action when the board called in a bailiff. The decision held. Madame Bize-Leroy was out as co-director of DRC. The Leroy seat passed to Pauline’s elder son Charles Roch, who was killed in a car accident three months later, and then to her younger son Henry-Frédéric Roch, who held it until his own death in 2018. Her daughter Perrine Fenal took up the seat in January 2019, and represents the Leroy family at DRC today.
Act VI: What happened next?
Madame Bize-Leroy retained her 25% stake in DRC, which she retains to this day. She sued DRC for twelve million francs after her dismissal. A French court ruled in her favour, struck down DRC’s counterclaim, and confirmed that the gray-market trading had been a matter of free commerce rather than breach of duty. Lamy de la Chapelle, who had triggered the whole affair, told the Mansson article that if anyone was at fault, it was him. He had brought catastrophe on her, he said, and he recognised it. He was wrong about that. By the time the vote was taken, she had been four years into the project that would answer the older argument between her father and Henri de Villaine about whose wines truly set the standard at the top of Burgundy. She has spent every year since making the case.
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