In person
IN PERSON
A Bottle of 1926 Auxey-Duresses
On 5 October 2019, at the auction house of SAS Guillaumot-Richard at Les Puces du Canal in Villefranche-sur-Saône, a case of twelve bottles of 1926 Auxey-Duresses came up for sale. The auction was a charity event organised on behalf of the Paul Bocuse Foundation, the institution that supports culinary education and preserves the heritage Bocuse spent his life building. The lots came from the cellars Bocuse had left behind when he died at Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or in January 2018. The case attracted serious attention from the room and on the line, the bidding climbed steadily and well past its estimate, and it went, in the end, for several multiples of it.
As a Vatel alumnus, on the other side of the friendly Lyonnaise hospitality divide from the Institut Paul Bocuse, there was a particular pleasure in winning a piece of the great rival school’s founder’s cellar, especially in knowing that the proceeds were going back to the city to support the kind of culinary education that both schools were built around. A few days later, the case had travelled from Villefranche-sur-Saône up to the cellars at Auxey-Duresses.
The story behind the bottles, which I knew when I bid for them, went back to 1976. Paul Bocuse was turning fifty, and Madame Bize-Leroy, by then his old friend through more than a decade of tastings at d’Auvenay, went down into her cellars to find him a wine from the year he was born. Bocuse came into the world at Collonges on 11 February 1926. The case she sent him was the 1926 Auxey-Duresses, made by her father from the family’s own vines in Les Clous.
The first bottle was opened in the cellars at Auxey-Duresses on 11 October 2019. Gilles Desprez and Gilles AC, both at the domaine at the time, sat with me while the cork came out. The wine was nearly a hundred years old, and the case had been in private storage for forty-three of those years. We knew before we poured that the bottles were unlikely to be uniform. We had picked a bottle from the middle of the case, neither the most promising nor the most worrying-looking, on the principle that the middle would tell us whether the case was worth keeping. The cork was clean. The fill was high. We poured and smelled it, then looked at each other without saying anything. Then the smiles started. The wine was alive. The fruit was there. The tannins had long since folded into the texture. It was not the greatest bottle the case might contain; it was a good one, and the fact that the middle bottle was this good suggested that the rest of the case would have wines to offer too. I asked Madame at that point whether she would let me come back with one of the remaining bottles and open it with her.
The lunch was on 7 February 2020, at her home above Saint-Romain, the d’Auvenay residence where the great tastings of the 1960s and 1970s had been held. The day was clear and very cold, the sun low over the Côte, and she came to the door with the dogs running ahead of her. The house, inside, was full: paintings on the walls in old frames, rugs on top of rugs, books on the shelves and in piles on the tables, and the religious art Madame Bize-Leroy has collected over a lifetime, statues and icons set among them. We sat down to a long lunch in a room she had laid for the occasion, and the bottles came up from the cellar one by one. We opened the 1926 from the Bocuse case. She looked at it for a long time. She said she had not had a 1926 in many years. She remembered, when pressed, that it had been a small and difficult harvest in her father’s vineyard. She was touched, and she said so, that the wine was still alive after all this time. She spoke about Bocuse. She spoke about the people who had passed through this house, the chefs and journalists and writers who had taken their education at her table.The vines that made the wine on the table no longer exist. The Les Clous parcel, the family’s own red holding above Auxey, was replanted to Chardonnay in the early years of d’Auvenay, and the wine that comes off it now is the white Auxey-Duresses Les Clous of Domaine d’Auvenay. The 1926 Auxey-Duresses we were drinking was therefore a wine that, by definition, can never be made again. The decision to replant the parcel, as Madame Bize-Leroy would later tell William Kelley in the World of Fine Wine, is one she has come to regret.
There is no one else in Burgundy who can tell this story from inside it. Most of the people Madame Bize-Leroy might name are no longer alive. Most of the bottles she might point to are no longer in cellars anyone can reach. To spend an afternoon listening to her is to spend an afternoon with the memory of the region itself, told by the person who lived through the years that turned it into what it is now. The 1926 was on the table because of the route it had taken, because of the man she had given it to, and because the vines that made it would never make another bottle of red wine. We drank it slowly, and I do not think I will ever drink anything quite like it again.
She had pulled a number of other bottles for the lunch. A 2002 d’Auvenay Mazis-Chambertin, a 2007 Meursault Gouttes d’Or, a 2009 Meursault Narvaux. As the light began to go, she went down to the cellar herself and came back with one more bottle. The Fine de Bourgogne Leroy du Centenaire. The label, in the elegant script of the period, sets out the story. It was an eau-de-vie de vin de Bourgogne selected by Henri Leroy from a distillation of Burgundy Grand Cru wines and aged by him for more than fifty years in the Auxey cellars. He had put it together for the centenary of the Maison in 1968, twelve years before his death, to mark the one hundredth year of the house his great-grandfather had founded. It has not been re-released since. Madame Bize-Leroy poured small measures into the glasses, set the bottle down, and said almost nothing. The spirit was deep amber, the nose layered with toasted almond, old wood, and dried orchard fruit, the palate long and composed. It was the closing gift of an extraordinary afternoon.
I have a little over ten years in this trade, and 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.
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