Maison: the story and the method
THE STORY & THE METHOD
Gardiens des Grands Millésimes
It is easy to mistake Maison Leroy for a smaller and lesser version of the Domaine. It is not that. The Maison is the older enterprise, the original Leroy business, founded in 1868 by François Leroy in Auxey-Duresses. It is also a fundamentally different undertaking from the Domaine in everything but its address.
At the Domaine, Madame Bize-Leroy farms her own vines, makes her own wine, and bottles it under her own name. At the Maison, she buys finished wines from other people’s vineyards, ages them in her own cellars for as long as she judges right, and releases them when, in her view, they are ready to drink. She does not make these wines. She chooses them. And what she chooses, year after year since 1955, has been the best of what Burgundy has been able to offer her.
The Maison’s slogan, in its own words: « Gardien des Grands Millésimes ». Keeper of the great vintages. The phrasing is not marketing. It is descriptive. The cellars in Auxey-Duresses, built up by Henri Leroy from 1919 onwards and never sold off, hold an unbroken library of Burgundy that runs back to the 1930s and, in places, further. There are vintages in the Maison’s cellars that no one else in Burgundy has bottled and aged continuously through, because no one else in Burgundy could afford to. Madame Bize-Leroy inherited the library, learned the language of the great vintages on her father’s wines as a child, and has spent her professional life adding to it.
THE METHOD
« Si j’aime un vin, je l’achète. Sinon, je ne l’achète pas. »
If I like a wine, I buy it. If not, I don’t.
The blind tasting is the heart of it. She does not know whose wine she is tasting. She does not know what it costs. She does not know what bottle it came from or what label is supposed to be on it. She knows the appellation, sometimes only the commune, and she judges the wine on what is in the glass. The wines she keeps are bought, brought back to Auxey and put down in the cellars. The wines she does not keep go back to the courtiers, who place them elsewhere. There is no relationship to defend, no producer to keep happy, no commercial logic to bend the verdict around. Only the wine.
THE TASTER
She has been doing this work, every season, every year, since 1955. She was twenty-three when her father put her at the head of the Maison and she went down into the cellars at Auxey. She has called herself a « rat de cave », a cellar rat, and the description has stuck because it is the right one. She has been tasting professionally, daily, since 1955. In any given working week she will pass through several hundred samples. In any given working year she will have tasted some thousands more.
There are, by now, very few people alive who have spent as much of their lives at a tasting bench as Madame Bize-Leroy has, and there is no one in Burgundy still working who comes close. The buyers who tasted alongside her at the great houses in the 1960s and 1970s are gone or retired. The generation behind them did not, by and large, conduct themselves the way she has. She is by now the last of a particular way of doing this work, and her verdict on a wine, given freely, given blind, given against the standard she has built up through a lifetime of doing exactly this, is what gives a Maison Leroy bottle its weight. The white capsule is the public mark of that verdict. It says only that Madame chose this one.
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