Maison: the collection
THE STORY
Once a year, the Great Vintages
Maison Leroy releases its wines once a year, in what the house calls the Collection. The selection process begins each September and runs four months. Madame Bize-Leroy tastes her way through the vinothèque, pulling out the wines she believes are now drinking the way they were always going to.
The criterion is readiness, not vintage chronology. A wine can be released the year after it was bought. A wine can be held back forty years. A wine can come up out of the Auxey cellars in a Collection that includes bottles thirty years older and bottles thirty years younger, all on the same release sheet, because all of them, in Madame Bize-Leroy’s judgement, are now drinking as they should. Each Collection is built fresh, from scratch, around what is ready.
Some years the Collection takes on a thematic shape. In a year ending in five, for example, she may put out wines from older vintages whose own last digit is five, an unspoken anniversary running through the release. The Collection of 2025, for instance, put out wines from a number of “5” years alongside others. The pattern is not a rule. It is a flourish, one of the small private games of a house that has been doing this for so long that the curator allows herself her own choices. The underlying principle, every year, remains the same: each wine in the Collection is in the box because Madame, having tasted it, has decided it is ready.
The Maison’s reputation, by the time the modern Collection took its present shape, was already what it had been since the 1960s. The great chefs and critics of France had been making their way to Auxey to taste at her table for half a century.
In April 1966, the Revue du Vin de France reported a tasting at the Maison’s cellars of the 1949 vintage that took in twenty-six wines from across the Côte, « étonnants de jeunesse, la plupart admirables ». Astonishing in their youth, most of them admirable.
Paul Bocuse, in a handwritten note in 1972 still preserved in the house: « Paul BOCUSE vous remercie de lui avoir fait découvrir les sommets de la Bourgogne. » Paul Bocuse thanks you for having shown him the summits of Burgundy.
Jacques Puisais, then president of the Union des Œnologues de France, captured what it was like to sit at Madame Bize-Leroy’s table as well as anyone has. « On est au Louvre, ici, » he said. We are at the Louvre here. « Ce sont des moments culturels autour de la vigne et de son langage. » These are cultural moments around the vine and its language.
Michel Bettane, writing in the Revue du Vin de France in October 1986, gave the same verdict in the language of the critic: « Des Bourgognes à leur plus haut degré d’expression : Leroy, une collection incomparable de vins qui résume tout le savoir-faire bourguignon. » Burgundies at their highest expression. A collection without equal, the summary of everything Burgundy has learned how to do.
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