The Wine Makes Itself

Madame Bize-Leroy does not call herself a winemaker. The wine, she says, makes itself, and the work of the cellar is to do as little to it as possible while keeping it from harm.

The sorted fruit goes into wooden vats sized to each parcel, neither destemmed nor crushed, so that oxidation is avoided and the indigenous yeasts on the bloom of the berries are preserved. Each cuvée goes into the same cuve every year. There is a long cold maceration before fermentation begins with those native yeasts. The cap is worked by foot and pumped over while the fermentation runs, and the wine is left on its skins long after the sugar has gone, often until the cap begins to sink of its own accord. There is no saignée, no bleeding of the vats to concentrate the must, because the concentration is already in the fruit when it arrives; the depth comes from the vine, not from a correction in the cellar. There is never any bleeding in my cellars, she once told a visiting critic, and there never has been.

After pressing, the reds go down into new oak in the first cellar and stay there until the malolactic fermentation has finished. The barrels come almost entirely from François Frères, in very fine-grained wood seasoned three years in the open air and given the lightest of toasts, which is not how most of the Côte buys its oak. From there the wines are racked carefully down a wooden chute into the second, cooler cellar at Vosne-Romanée. The reds are bottled early by Burgundy standards, sometimes within a year of the harvest, on the principle that the wine should leave the barrel before it has had to take on more oxygen or more sulphur than it needs. Bottling follows the lunar calendar, and for the past twenty years the larger cuvées have been run off by gravity, five barrels at a time. Nothing is fined and nothing is filtered. The corks are long and dense, from one of the best suppliers in Spain.

The whites take a different course. Grapes are pressed as they come in, whole and uncrushed, and the juice goes to barrel with very little settling, so that the fermentation begins with everything the fruit carried and finds its own pace. The wines then sit on their lees, frequently through two winters, and go into bottle well after the reds.

Its bottle, with a deep punt and sloping shoulders, was redesigned at the 2000 vintage and has been the visual signature of the estate ever since. The cellars sit deep and the humidity never drops, and it is this combination, with the steady low temperature, that allows the wines and the corks to age as slowly as they do.

Then they wait. Historically the domaine released its wines four to five years after bottling, which is already far longer than almost any estate in Burgundy can afford to hold its stock. In recent years Madame Bize-Leroy has gone further and changed the shape of the release, sending out a selection of different cuvées from different vintages each year, each one chosen because she has tasted it and decided it is drinking as it should. It is the same instinct that governs the Maison, applied now to her own domaine: the wine leaves the cellar when Madame judges it ready, which is the whole point.

There is one detail that anyone who has handled the wines knows before they have read a word of the label. The capsule. Nowadays a bottle of Domaine Leroy carries a deep red wax capsule on the reds and a yellow one on the whites, and the Maison Leroy bottlings wear white capsule. It is the quickest tell in any cellar: red and yellow caps, the Domaine; white cap, the Maison.

Christian Louboutin built a house on the idea that a flash of red on the sole of a shoe could mean one thing and one thing only. Madame Bize-Leroy got there first, in the cellars of Vosne-Romanée, and to a certain kind of collector the red Leroy cap quickens the pulse in much the same way that the red sole does. The difference is that Louboutin sells you the thrill on the way out of the shop, while Leroy has already done the waiting for you: when a red cap leaves the cellar, Madame has decided it is ready to drink.

A word for the nervous buyer

Leroy fills its bottles unusually high at bottling, with very little air left under the cork, and a consequence of this is that the wines often show some weeping past the capsule and a little seepage, more so on bottles from 2000 onwards than on the 1990s. On almost any other producer that would be a warning sign. On Leroy it is normal, it is well known in the trade, and it is not a reason for concern. A faint stain beneath the capsule of a Leroy is closer to a maker’s mark than a fault.

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