Critical reception
CRITICAL RECEPTION
The case the wines have made for themselves
Three of the most demanding palates in the trade have spent the last three decades writing about the wines of Domaine Leroy. They have not agreed on everything, but they have agreed on this. Between them, Allen Meadows at Burghound, the team at the Wine Advocate (Parker, Rovani, Schildknecht, Galloni, Martin and most recently William Kelley), and the critics at Vinous (Tanzer, then Galloni, with notes from Neal Martin) have published close to fifteen hundred reviews of the Domaine wines since the founding vintage of 1988.
Among them, one hundred wines have been scored 98 points or higher, with seventeen perfect 100-point scores on the combined record. The Musigny alone, across nearly sixty reviews from these three publications over thirty years, has an average critical score of 96 points. These are not the inflated 100-point harvests of a Bordeaux primeur season or a Suckling Tuscan run. The Burgundy critics give 100 points about as freely as the French state hands back an overpayment on the annual tax return, which is to say, after three forms, two missing documents, and a wait that begins to feel philosophical.
What the critics have actually said, however, matters more than the numbers. Galloni, in 2012, wrote what stands as the deepest verdict in the Burgundy critical vocabulary:
There is no more ardent exponent of the most fundamental of all Burgundian values, the concept of terroir, than Lalou Bize-Leroy.
Antonio Galloni
William Kelley, twelve years later, was sharper, and his line carries the heart of the case for these wines against the rest of the region: Bize-Leroy, he wrote,
is making wines not for the present, but for eternity
William Kelley
The market had by now
clearly understood that her communal bottlings embarrass far too many grands crus.
William Kelley
For Galloni again, writing on the 2017 Musigny, the wines have passed beyond the usual frame: It is not really wine. It is an expression of a Pinot Noir, of a place and of a year, as interpreted by Lalou Bize-Leroy.
The most recent vintages have stretched the language further. Allen Meadows, who has visited the domaine every year since 1995, wrote in early 2022 that the 2019s were the greatest I have yet seen from her when the portfolio is considered from top to bottom. A year later, having tasted the 2020s, he gave them as their match. Meadows does not, on principle, award 100 points to any wine. On the 2020 Romanée-Saint-Vivant he came close enough to make the principle look unnecessary: if there is such a thing as a perfect Romanée-Saint-Vivant, this is it… you’re left wondering if wine can get any better. He stopped at ninety-nine plus.
It would be tempting to read all of this as the long vindication of one woman against the trade, the family, the critics and the times. It is not quite that. What Madame Bize-Leroy has been doing since 1988 is the patient demonstration of a single proposition, which is that fine Burgundy is what you get when you ask less of the vine and give it more time. The vines have answered her. The wines have followed. The critics, in the end, have only had to keep up.
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