In a piece first published in WFW67 in 2020, William Kelley, caught up with the ever-mercurial Mme Lalou Bize-Leroy of Domaines Leroy and d’Auvenay.

Lalou Bize-Leroy, Burgundy’s reigning grande dame, has confounded her critics. Those who scoffed at her wholehearted embrace of biodynamic viticulture in the 1980s are now confronted by scores of domaines following suit all along the Côte d’Or. Commentators who found Domaine Leroy’s early vintages too stylized are forced to acknowledge the graceful evolution of those first essays, as well as the immense strides the estate has made since. And anyone who doubted whether the market could sustain Leroy’s extraordinarily high prices for long is obliged to admit that the domaine’s wines dominate any list, short or long, of the world’s most expensive. 

Yet if this elfin and mercurial woman feels satisfaction at having proven all the skeptics wrong, she doesn’t show it. “We’re never satisfied,” she is wont to declare. “Ours is a métier of unending doubts, whereby everything remains perpetually in question. And that’s for the best. Only the unimaginative are sure of themselves.” As Madame Bize-Leroy enters her 89th year, that unwillingness to rest on laurels endures; her two estates, Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay, may be firmly established as Burgundy’s reference points, but they’re also—as we shall see—among the region’s most innovative. This article tells the Leroy story. 

Lalou Bize-Leroy: Origin story

That story begins with François Leroy, a vigneron in Auxey-Duresses. In addition to those in his home village, François owned vines in Pommard, Volnay, and Meursault, as well as parcels in grands crus Chambertin, Clos Vougeot, Musigny, and Richebourg. Indeed, a price list printed in Beaune in 1951 for the Comptoir des Proprietaires de la Côte d’Or lists François Leroy’s 1847 Musigny and Richebourg for sale. Keen to expand further, François established Maison Leroy, a négociant business, in 1867; and from that date until the foundation of Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay, the Leroy family’s vineyard holdings were always bottled under the Maison Leroy label. Thus, old bottles of Maison Leroy cuvées such as Meursault Les Narvaux or red Auxey-Duresses are, in fact, domaine wines. 

In the later 19th century, Maison Leroy continued to expand, now under the direction of François’s son Joseph Leroy. Joseph and his wife Louise Curteley also diversified into spirits and eaux-de-vie, fashionable in an epoch when, for example, the Mugnier family was better known for its crème de cassis than its Musigny. François and Louise won medals throughout Europe for their wines and spirits, and at the turn of the century, Maison Leroy—based out of the commodious premises it occupies to this day on Auxey-Duresses’s rue du Pont Boillot—was evidently thriving. 

Henri Leroy’s elder brother Marcel chose to devote himself to his dairy farm at d’Auvenay, on the plateau high above St-Romain, so it was Henri who took over the family business in 1919. Henri continued his parents’ work in spirits, establishing a subsidiary to produce Cognac and eaux-de-vie and building distilleries in Segonzac and Gensac-la-Pallue in the Charente. Indeed, while Maison Leroy continued to deal in the fine wines of the Côte d’Or, the trade in spirits and fortified wines became its financial engine room, and the firm prospered. 

Henri Leroy to the rescue 

As Henri Leroy’s business grew, so did his family. In the mid-1920s, Henri married Simone Brun, and the couple had two daughters: Pauline, born in 1929, and Marcelle, universally known as Lalou, born in Paris in 1932. About this time, Henri and his family left Auxey-Duresses, moving to the larger village of Meursault, where Lalou would grow up. And it was around the turn of the decade, too, that Henri became both a client of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and a friend of its gérant, Edmond Gaudin de Villaine. 

Beset by creditors and in sore need of expensive investment, these were hard times for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and ownership of this iconic but loss-making estate was divided between Edmond’s sons Henri and Jean—who had inherited their stake from their mother, Marie-Dominique Chambon, in 1915—and his brother-in-law, Jacques Chambon. De Villaine himself lived almost 125 miles (200km) away in the quiet town of Moulins, commuting to Vosne-Romanée once a week by taxi, and subsidized the upkeep of the estate with the revenues of his cattle farm. Chambon, however, was somewhat less committed to the Domaine, and by the 1930s it was an open secret that he was looking for an opportunity to sell.

In 1942, the moment came, and Henri Leroy bought Chambon’s shares, becoming owner of half of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti—now restructured as a société civile. For the eight years that followed, Henri and Edmond worked together in harmony, guided by their shared devotion to the Domaine, replanting its remaining phylloxera-stricken vines after the 1945 vintage. And after Edmond’s death in 1950, Henri Leroy’s role was formalized as co-gérant alongside Edmond’s son, Henri de Villaine. Known in Burgundy as the “two Henris,” Leroy and de Villaine were effective collaborators, and the estate both prospered and even—with the fermage of the Domaine Marey-Monge’s vines in Romanée-St-Vivant and the purchase of holdings in Le Montrachet—expanded. It was not until 1972, however, that Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was actually restored to profitability. 

Lalou Bize-Leroy takes the helm

From an early age, Henri Leroy’s younger daughter Lalou had taken a keen interest in wine. Indeed, Henri had touched her lips with a drop of 1929 Musigny when she was born, and Lalou recalls finishing the dregs left in the glasses of departed guests when her parents entertained. “I still remember the Volnay Clos de la Bousse d’Or of 1934, which my mother adored, as well as Hospices 1919 Beaune Cuvée Nicolas Rolin,” she reminisces. Every year, she would take a few days off school to participate in the harvest, and she was fascinated by the work in the cellar, often sneaking into the cellars to watch. 

By the early 1950s, as Henri Leroy devoted more and more of his time and energy to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, he continued to purchase fine wines for the family négociant business, but their sale was far from being his priority. The problem found a happy solution in 1955, when Lalou, resisting the allure of a life in the Alps, took charge of Maison Leroy at the age of 23. Lalou demanded and received carte blanche, setting about purchasing finished wines of the highest quality up and down the Côte d’Or—surely an incomparable school in the nuances of tasting. 

During this period, Lalou would also accompany her father on his weekly visits to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and in 1964 Maison Leroy acquired the worldwide distribution rights to the domaine’s wines—excluding only the UK and the United States. Just a few years later, in 1967, Leroy’s spirits subsidiary in the Charente was wound down. And in 1974, Lalou Bize-Leroy and Aubert de Villaine replaced their fathers as co-gérants of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

The genesis of Domaines Leroy and d’Auvenay 

In the 1950s and 1960s, many of Burgundy’s best producers had yet to begin estate bottling—Lalou sourced her Gevrey-Chambertin Champeaux and Charmes-Chambertin, for example, from the Dugat family. And there were other high-quality sources in that era that have simply disappeared, such as Domaine des Comtes de St Quentin, where Lalou worked the 1955 vintage. (Its holdings of Clos de Bèze, next to Duroché’s, were bought by Clair-Daü and then went to Jadot, while its cuverie is now a retirement home in Brochon named La Croix Violette.) “I learned a lot there,” Lalou descants, “and I still have plenty of their wines in my cellars. The owner loved his vines!” Indeed, the Comte oversaw the vineyards and made the wines himself, which was quite unusual in that era. 

In the 1950s and ’60s, Lalou generally purchased the wines she selected in barrel, completing their élevage in the firm’s cellars in Auxey-Duresses. But by the 1980s, as more and more domaines began to bottle more and more of the wine that they produced, pickings became slimmer. Moreover, the flagrant abuse of agrochemicals that had begun in the mid-1960s meant that Lalou increasingly struggled to find wines that could meet the exacting standards she set for Maison Leroy in this era. Purchasing a domaine of her own was the obvious solution, and Lalou tells me that she even contemplated acquiring Domaine des Lambrays. But she had always wanted to produce a diverse range of appellations, so when Domaine Charles Noëllat came on the market in 1988, she didn’t hesitate. 

Much neglected by that time, Domaine Charles Noëllat nonetheless boasted an extraordinary array of appellations, including Richebourg and Romanée-St-Vivant, many of the holdings planted with old vines—and, even more important, with high-quality massal selections of Pinot Noir. Lalou renovated the winery and cellars in time for the 1988 vintage, and supplemented by the Leroy historic family holdings, the Noëllat vineyards became the basis for the new Domaine Leroy. 

More acquisitions followed rapidly. First, only a few months after the Noëllat sale, came a parcel of Volnay Santenots, bequeathed to Lalou by its proprietor. A year later, she bought a further 2.5ha (6 acres) from Domaine Philippe Rémy in Gevrey-Chambertin, including important parcels in Clos de la Roche, Latricières-Chambertin, and Chambertin itself. And in 1990 came more Musigny, purchased from Domaine Moine-Hudelot. Since then, Corton-Renardes, Corton-Charlemagne, Chambolle-Musigny Les Charmes, and additional holdings in Chambertin have followed over the years. 

At the same time that Lalou was acquiring Domaine Charles Noëllat—an acquisition funded by the sale of a stake in Maison Leroy to Takashimaya—she also established another independent estate in her own right: Domaine d’Auvenay. Lalou had inherited the farm of d’Auvenay from her uncle, Marcel Leroy, and it was here that she lived with her Swiss husband Marcel Bize (1924–2004). At its inception, Domaine d’Auvenay was devoted to the production of white wine, and Lalou planted the Leroy family red holdings in Auxey-Duresses Les Clous over to Chardonnay, a decision she seems to regret today: “Those vines made beautiful wine. But at the time, it didn’t make sense to keep the Pinot Noir.” 

The first vintage of Domaine d’Auvenay was 1989, the historic Leroy holding complemented by a newly acquired plot of Puligny-Montrachet Les Folatières. In 1990 came a tiny parcel of Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet, and in 1992 several rows of Chevalier-Montrachet. Two red grands crus followed shortly thereafter: Bonnes-Mares, in 1993, and Mazis-Chambertin, acquired from the Collignon family, a longtime supplier of the Maison Leroy, in 1994. More recently, Lalou purchased a parcel of Bâtard-Montrachet and contiguous holdings in Puligny-Montrachet Les Enseignères from the Bavard family in 2011. 

While these two new stars in the Burgundian firmament were emerging, however, tensions were building between Lalou and Aubert de Villaine at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. In 1992, matters came to a head, and Lalou was replaced as co-director by her nephew, Charles Roch, who perished in a car accident three months later and was succeeded by his brother Henry-Frédéric. At the same time, Leroy lost the exclusive right to distribute Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s wines. When Perrine Fenal, Lalou’s daughter, succeeded Henry-Frédéric Roch in early 2019, following his death the previous November, another chapter in this saga opened.

Biodynamics

It is curious to reflect that the proximate causes of Burgundy’s biodynamic revolution have often been haphazard. Anne-Claude Leflaive’s first forays into the world of Rudolf Steiner, for example, were prompted by a flyer in a Dijon grocery store. And for Lalou Bize-Leroy, it was an article on Nicolas Joly in the Swiss newspaper Tribune de Genève, spotted by her husband Marcel, that opened her eyes to this different approach to viticulture. Yet if the discovery took place by chance, it satisfied an intensifying desire to break with chemical farming. “I knew we had to stop using chemicals in the vineyards, but I didn’t know what to replace them with,” Lalou explains. “Biodynamics was exactly what I was looking for.”

In due course, Lalou visited Joly in Savennières and was forced to admit that his vines were in better health than her own. She returned to Burgundy entirely convinced, drawing on the advice of another Loire wine grower, the pioneering biodynamic consultant François Bouchet, to initiate the wholesale biodynamic conversion of Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay. 

Everything went well until a fateful day in 1993. “I passed by the vineyards on Tuesday, and everything was fine,” Lalou recalls. “But on Thursday, Vosne-Romanée and Nuits-St-Georges were devastated, and journalists were already in the Romanée-St-Vivant, surveying the damage.” She surmises that clay had blocked the nozzles of her sprayer, preventing the proper application of copper and sulfur. In any case, much of the crop was lost to mildew, and she produced only 700 liters of Romanée-St-Vivant from her 1ha (2.47-acre) holdings. In an era when some considered even green-harvesting criminally wasteful, Lalou was the butt of criticism. She remembers them saying, “That madwoman can’t see that her vines are dying,” but her commitment to biodynamics remained unwavering. 

While Lalou was among Burgundy’s earliest adopters of biodynamics, “We’ve invented nothing,” she insists. That means the regular application of tisanes and decoctions—especially dandelion, chamomile, and horsetail—all prepared with dechlorinated water and adapted according to the needs of the vines, the soil, and the phases of the lunar calendar. Lalou is a great partisan of Maria Thun’s barrel compost, which she credits with particular efficacy. And she even resorted to acupuncture in her parcel of Volnay Santenots when other approaches failed. Above all, she characterizes biodynamics as a perpetual work in progress: “After more than 30 years, one can observe the improvements, but the battle isn’t won. To decontaminate soils tainted with chemicals takes a long, long time.”

Growing grapes 

Drive along Burgundy’s route des vins, and the vineyards of Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay are impossible to miss. Since the 2000 vintage, Lalou’s vines haven’t been hedged. Instead, her team laboriously roll the vines’ canopies—a technique often described as tressage in French, or braiding. Whereas producers who hedge-cut the apical shoot four or five times during the growing season, creating a hormonal stress response in the plants that favors vegetative growth, rolled canopies promote ripening. Grapes grown on vines trellised this way, its proponents argue, attain physiological ripeness faster, at lower sugar levels, than hedged vines’ fruit—an obviously interesting implication in an era of climate change. 

Over the past few years, Lalou has even raised the height of her vines’ trellising wires, to accommodate all their energy, so her parcels now tower above her neighbors’. But other producers are following suit, attracted by the promise of both healthier vines and earlier physiological maturation. Domaine Dugat-Py, for example, began experiments with tressage in its Mazis-Chambertin in the mid-2000s and has now adopted it wholesale. Olivier Lamy in St-Aubin and Jean-Marc Vincent in Santenay are also working this way in some of their holdings. And the young Charles Lachaux has recently converted his entire Vosne-Romanée-based domaine to tressage. Meanwhile, Jean-Yves Bizot has also stopped hedging his vines, though he prefers to train them to individual stakes, en échalas. In short, where Lalou led, some of Burgundy’s most enquiring minds are following. 

These trellising techniques are accompanied by strict debudding to limit yields—which are routinely among the very lowest in Burgundy. But by contrast, Lalou is vehemently opposed to deleafing. “One must have as many leaves as  possible. There are never enough leaves! They nourish the plant,” she emphasizes. Systematic replanting is also inconceivable: dead or dying vines are instead replaced one by one, using cuttings from the domaine’s own sélection massale. “A vineyard,” Lalou believes, “should be like a village, where infants and the elderly live alongside children and adults.” 

From grapes to wine 

Come vintage time, the tiny and intensely concentrated bunches that Lalou’s vines produce are harvested with the utmost care. Placed gently into small plastic crates that are deliberately underfilled to avoid any crushing when they’re stacked for transport, the grapes travel in refrigerated vans—either to Domaine d’Auvenay in St-Romain, or Domaine Leroy in Vosne-Romanée, depending on their provenance. Once they arrive, they’re fastidiously sorted by 50 pairs of hands. The white grapes are pressed immediately, without crushing, in a pneumatic press—with the exception of Domaine d’Auvenay’s tiny parcel of Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet, so small that it’s processed using a manual basket press—and their must goes to barrel with minimal settling. There, the wines ferment at their own pace and mature on the lees. 

While Chardonnay and Aligoté go straight to the press, when handling the domaines’ Pinot Noir, the eagle-eyed ladies on the sorting table cut out each cluster’s central rachis by hand, retaining the berries intact on their pedicels—an immensely labor-intensive process that avoids crushing the grapes or disturbing the bloom of yeasts on their skins. “I don’t want to crush the berries or damage the bloom,” explains Lalou, “but nor do I want too many whole bunches or green stems; they detract from the expression of fruit and bring the wrong sort of tannins.” As with tressage in the vineyards, this is a technique that’s now being emulated more widely, by winemakers including Arnaud Mortet, Vincent Dureuil, and Cécile Tremblay—though at other addresses, it’s generally confined to certain small cuvées or to a limited proportion of the harvest. 

At Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay, these laboriously processed grapes are left to ferment in wooden cuves—and each cuvée is fermented in the same cuve every year. Throughout the fermentation, pigeage is done by foot, supplemented by remontage. And macerations are long, with the young wine frequently remaining on the skins until the cap starts to sink. Located in the cool of St-Romain, and with only two red-wine cuves, Domaine d’Auvenay’s winery is never as warm as Domaine Leroy’s, so fermentation temperatures tend to be lower—perhaps contributing to the finer-boned style of the Domaine’s red wines when compared with their siblings vinified in Vosne-Romanée, which always seem to carry a little more mid-palate flesh in their infancy. 

When Lalou decides to conclude the cuvaison, the marc is pressed with a pneumatic press and free-run and press wine are combined, descending to barrel by gravity. The latter are purchased new, almost exclusively from Tonnellerie François Frères, and Lalou favors very fine-grained wood, seasoned for 36 months and scarcely toasted—a choice unusual along the Côte d’Or. While the whites often see two winters on the lees, Lalou racks her reds after malolactic fermentation and frequently bottles them comparatively early, sometimes within a year of the harvest but always in accordance with the lunar calendar. For the better part of two decades, the larger cuvées have been bottled by gravity, five barrels at a time. Corks are long and dense, from one of Spain’s finest suppliers, and all the Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay bottles are waxed. 

The wines of Lalou Bize-Leroy

So much for Lalou’s exacting methods, but what of the wines? At their best, to my palate, they are indeed Burgundy’s greatest. Domaine d’Auvenay’s whites—and Domaine Leroy’s solitary Corton-Charlemagne—are textural, structured, and searingly intense. There’s nothing like them anywhere in the world. What’s more, in the era of premature oxidation, their reliably graceful evolution in bottle finds few rivals. And Lalou’s reds are just as thrilling: Kaleidoscopically perfumed, pungently concentrated, and built around the powderiest of tannins, they exemplify the ideal of intensity without weight. Certainly, they’ve improved since those early vintages: Every five or six years seems to bring Lalou a step closer to her goals, and the domaines’ 2010s, tasted alongside their 1999s, are evidently superior. But it would be churlish to deny that the wines have—their improvement notwithstanding—been fabulous since the start.

These are whites and reds that in a sense transcend their appellations, in that Lalou’s Auxey-Duresses Les Boutonniers from Domaine d’Auvenay surpasses many a grand cru from Puligny or Chassagne; just as her Chambolle-Musigny Les Fremières can embarrass many producers’ Amoureuses or Bonnes Mares. Domaine d’Auvenay’s magical Aligoté certainly suggests that Lalou’s methods also transcend cépage. But in their own context, tasted alongside their siblings, it’s hard to think of any domaines whose wines follow the Côte d’Or’s hierarchy of appellations more faithfully or conform more closely to the received wisdom of what each appellation should taste like. So, if these are wines that transcend expectations, they also reassert old paradigms. 

For this taster, however, the wines of Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay above all pose an urgent and fundamental question: Burgundy’s wines are defined by their terroirs, yet how often do those terroirs impose limits on their quality? As Lalou Bize-Leroy approaches 90, it’s fair to say that no one in the modern history of Burgundy has done more to pose that implicit question; and it’s certain that no one is doing more to answer it. 

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From the sandy terroir, to the ethereal style of Grenache, Château Rayas is an estate unlike any other in the Southern Rhône appellation.

Many of France’s greatest wines exemplify their appellations, but some transcend them. Nestled in one of the cooler corners of a warm, sun-kissed region; defined by sandy soils in a sector known for its heat-retentive glacial cobbles; and planted with a single grape variety, Grenache Noir, when the local vignerons have the right to blend fully 13, Château Rayas clearly numbers among the exceptions. Pouring a glass only confirms this; where so many of its neighbors are dark and brooding, Rayas is pale and limpid, ethereal and perfumed; powerful, yes, but sensual, too. Indeed, I’ve often thought that Rayas really deserves an appellation all to itself.  

The reasons for Rayas’s singularity are manifold. Foremost, of course, is the place itself, and anyone who manages to secure an appointment at this elusive address is warmly advised to skip the tasting and beg for a vineyard tour instead. For though a mere six-minute drive from the village of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Rayas feels a world away, secluded amid cool, evergreen woodland in the northeast of the appellation; an oasis of flora and fauna in a region that is devoted more and more exclusively to monoculture.

Here there are none of the famous galets roulés, the large cobbles that pave the plateau of Le Crau; instead the vines are rooted in a topsoil of fine sand and silt; underneath is a permeable layer of friable conglomerate (safre, in local parlance), then water-retentive clay. Indeed, so poor are these soils that Rayas is planted at only 2,500 vines per hectare: lower than the appellation norms, but the highest density that they can sustain. The Reynaud family crops them short, too, to limit the loss of precious water by foliar transpiration.

Oriented gently to the north, the estate’s aspect preserves the grapes’ freshness and aromatic range; and so, too, does the fact that fully 11 of its 23ha (27 of 59 acres) are devoted to woodland rather than the vine. Historic aerial photographs of the region offer a poignant testimony to the speed with which copses and hedges disappeared elsewhere in the appellation, from the 1970s on, as on the one hand, vignerons made space for heavier machinery, and on the other, Châteauneuf’s success incentivized planting every available square meter. Today, Rayas stands out as the exception—and in the face of a changing climate, the Reynaud family’s obstinacy seems visionary. 

The Rayas vineyard itself is composed of three distinct lieux-dits—Le Levant, Le Coeur, and Le Couchant—which straddle a small valley and catch, respectively, the rising, midday, and setting sun. These lieux-dits are planted exclusively to Grenache, which here expresses itself with remarkable aromatic amplitude; but each contributes something unique to the finished wine. Tasting before they’re blended, Le Levant is the most floral and ethereal, contributing the wine’s spine; Le Coeur is the most complete, contributing Rayas’s skeleton; and Le Couchant, with its richer, more compote-like fruit tones, brings the fat. The ensemble, of course, is always more than the sum of the parts, and in this respect, Rayas—like several of the Côte de Nuits’ great Monopoles—combines the identity of a cru with the advantages of a blend.

Pignan, occasionally designated the “Clos Pignan” in the past, stands alongside Rayas as a sort of junior sibling. With its uniform exposition, from a single block surrounded by pine trees, Pignan is also a stalking horse to Rayas, throwing into relief, with its more direct and monolithic personality, how much plenitude and completeness Rayas’s varying expositions contribute to the final blend. 

Rayas: An intensely characterful personality

Unlike the grands crus of the Côte de Nuits, however, all this is of comparatively recent creation. Albert Reynaud, a retired notary who had lost his sight, purchased the estate in 1880 as a rural retreat in a region ravaged by phylloxera. And it was, by all accounts, his son Louis who really created Château Rayas as we know it, replacing woodland and fruit trees with grafted Grenache vines, beginning in 1915. Louis, a strong personality, was at the helm until his death in 1978, and famously defied the authorities for years by designating his wine as “1er Grand Cru,” a classification of his own invention. On Louis’ death, his reclusive son Jacques, no less eccentric than his father, succeeded him; and when Jacques passed away suddenly in 1997, the estate passed to his nephew Emmanuel, a succession masterminded by Jacques’ sister, Françoise. 

Perhaps the fact that the estate has always remained in the family that created it helps to account for its intensely characterful personality. Rayas has always been run without compromise, and the Reynauds march to the beat of their own drum. The larger Château de Fonsalette, acquired in 1945, permitted them to accept derisory yields at Rayas with equanimity, the two estates enjoying a symbiotic relationship. That has permitted the pursuit of advanced maturity, even in the face of disease or inclement weather, waiting to pick in October after end-of-season thunderstorms restore balance to the ripe, concentrated berries. And the same spirit of equanimity permeates the winemaking. The Grenache bunches are crushed without destemming, and macerate with minimal intervention in cement vats for three to four weeks. Blended with the best of the press wine, Rayas completes its malolactic fermentation in enameled steel tanks in the winery’s attic, remaining there until the Spring, when it descends to the cellars, filling ancient barrels freshly emptied of the previous vintage.

All of this takes place in unassuming, if not unprepossessing, premises, constructed by Louis in the 1930s firmly within the boundaries of the brand-new Châteauneuf-du-Pape AOC so that Rayas could never be denied the appellation. Lacking in modern conveniences, except for a pneumatic press, much has been made of their dingy appearance, though in reality the dusty floors and ancient barrels hardly distinguish this winery from any number of others. Rather, it’s the vineyards outside and the wine in the bottles that set Rayas apart. Indeed, the irony is that though the winery itself may have been intended to anchor Rayas in Châteauneuf, the wines themselves transcend it. 

The post The singularity of Château Rayas appeared first on World Of Fine Wine.

Martine Saunier, who passed away in February after a short battle with cancer, was a pioneering importer who introduced American consumers to many of France’s greatest wineries. Many will remember Saunier for her role as an ambassador for the likes of Château Rayas, Henri Jayer, and Lalou Bize-Leroy; but she was also a fiercely independent entrepreneur, and a generous mentor whose loss will leave  a void for many in the wine industry, young and old, both in the United States and abroad. 

Saunier was born in Paris in 1934  to a family marked, like so many, by World War I. Her father, a wounded veteran, had lost two brothers to the fighting, and her mother’s family had been left impoverished. When conflict returned, the Sauniers fled the city, depositing Saunier with her aunt and uncle at their small farm in Collonges in the Mâconnais. There, she soon adapted to rural life, living in near-autarky, surrounded by gardens, rabbits, cows, orchards—and vineyards. The return  to Paris in 1942, all rationing and aerial bombardment, made for a violent contrast. 

The summer, however, was still spent at Collonges, and it was in 1945 that Saunier began to learn about the vintage. She often reminisced about the harvest ambience: pickers passing a shared bottle of wine from row to row while snacking on sausage and pâté; her uncle dismantling the cumbersome wooden press while cleaning and repairing wooden casks and vats. Later, in the balmy summer of 1947, she would experience intoxication for the first time, over-indulging in the new red wine of that remarkable year direct from the press—an excess she vowed, with remarkable success, never to repeat. 

At 18, Saunier was packed off to London after a stint at an école de commerce, her father unreceptive to talk of the Beaux Arts. Various jobs followed, as a translator and in the airline industry, before she moved to California in 1964. But her affinity for wine, nurtured by those childhood experiences, endured. 

The seeds of an import business

The seeds of an import business were sown on a 1967 visit to Napa Valley, when André Tchelistcheff, the legendary winemaker at Beaulieu Vineyard, told her that she’d need to go to Burgundy if she wanted to get hold of real Pinot Noir. Disappointed by the offerings available in San Francisco—oxidized Santenay, as she told it, and adulterated Bourgogne Rouge—she partnered with German importer Chris Hillebrand to bring in French wines under his license, taking a commission. 

Saunier’s first buying trip took place in May 1969. Purchasing a Volkswagen Bug in Antwerp, and accompanied by her mother, she toured the vineyards of France in pursuit of out-of-the-way gems, instinctively drawn to the most artisanal and authentic producers. The first was Vouvray’s elderly Léonard Douzilly, recommended by a friend of her father’s. Run to ground at a local café, Douzilly hobbled on a crutch to his small caveau, opening a mold-covered bottle of 1959. She ordered 300 bottles on the spot, with the directness that would characterize the rest of her career. (“When that girl ordered 300 bottles, I almost soiled myself,” Douzilly would later colorfully recall to a  mutual friend.)

That inaugural visit also led her to Château Rayas, a defining moment in her career. Later, she would recall her first encounter with a reclusive Louis Reynaud, a diminutive gentleman clad in waistcoat, necktie, beret, and round spectacles. A tasting followed: Rayas 1959, then 1961. She ordered 300 bottles, at the princely sum of $2.50  per bottle; an order Reynaud accepted, to Saunier’s father’s consternation, from an unknown woman without references. The only hiccup was a delayed delivery, when Louis Reynaud decided to transvasage any bottles of the 1959 that had thrown a sediment. 

Saunier’s relationship would encompass three generations of Reynauds. Louis had never formally introduced her to his son, Jacques,  a silent presence during their meetings; but it was he who took the helm in 1978. They gradually got to know each other over lunches at La Beaugravière, chef Guy Julien’s truffle-focused restaurant in Mondragon (Julien was outraged that Reynaud never once paid the bill). Saunier also began importing the wines being produced by Jacques’ nephew, Emmanuel, who had left the local cooperative and begun estate-bottling at the family’s Château des Tours.  In 1997, when Jacques Reynaud died  on his birthday, trying on shoes in Avignon, it was Emmanuel who took over stewardship of Rayas and Fonsalette. 

A Burgundy legacy

But although the Rhône, the Loire,  and other French regions would  remain staples of the Saunier’s Wines portfolio—which soon grew into  a successful standalone business  in 1979—her legacy will always be inextricably linked with the wines of Burgundy. She introduced consumers to the wines of Henri Jayer with the 1972 vintage, profiting from the year’s lukewarm reception in the press to gain a toehold with his communal bottlings and a few cases of Vosne-Romanée premier cru Les Beaumonts. The wines’ immediate popularity paved the way to importing the whole range. 

The 1978 vintage, a year Jayer considered something of a breakthrough in his career, was a particular turning point, with Henri visiting the East and West Coasts to present the wines. Saunier was wont  to recount a memorable encounter at Greenblatt’s Deli on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, featuring a bottle of 1978 Richebourg so aromatic that it overpowered the ambient aromas of pastrami to seduce the ownership into  a substantial purchase (much of which ended up in the cellar of Joe Smith of Capital Records). Henri and Saunier maintained an affectionate correspondence over the years, with one missive, a dedication in a book, reminding her that “the wines of Burgundy will always be the best in  the world—on condition that they  are made by a great winemaker.”

Saunier’s connection with Lalou Bize-Leroy began later, in 1986, initially a relationship of convenience. Bize-Leroy—whom she remembered as deeply impressive, but also mercurial and imperious—was dissatisfied  with the warehousing offered by her then-importer. Saunier was able to arrange a more satisfactory solution, and promptly became Leroy’s new importer. When Bize-Leroy founded her own Domaine Leroy in 1988 and Domaine d’Auvenay a year later, Saunier took those on, too, importing some of the Burgundy’s most epoch-making wines to the United States. 

Of course, an exhaustive list of all Saunier’s notable producers would be impossible. The underlying theme to her selections, however, was always authenticity. Digging out small, artisanal growers crafting deeply characterful, singular wines was her hallmark as an importer. In the process, Saunier reshaped how Americans understood French wine, turning obscure growers into household names. 

In 2012, at the age of 73 and after a foray into film with A Year in Burgundy (followed by sequels in Champagne  and Porto), Saunier sold her business  to Gregory Castells, a French-born former head sommelier of Pétrus and The French Laundry who had become  a good client. “I told her that I wanted to start an online wine business,” he recalls, “and she replied, ‘Why don’t  you buy my business instead,’” another example of that trademark candor. Today, as her eponymous company continues to thrive, Saunier’s legacy endures not just in the bottles she championed but in the countless palates she educated and the growers she immortalized. 

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Among the cognoscenti to have been inspired by the man and his wines, William Kelley pays tribute to Terry Leighton, the self-effacing genius behind Kalin Cellars, California’s most idiosyncratic winery.

With the passing of Terry Leighton of Kalin Cellars at the age of 78, the state of California has lost one of its most pioneering and original winemakers. Terry and Frances, his wife of 51 years who predeceased him, were professors of microbiology who dared to reimagine the parameters of the possible for Californian wine; even if that meant relinquishing the fame and fortune that the success of their early releases promised. Yet as among the first to barrel-ferment white wines in California, and as pioneers of cool-climate Sonoma County vineyards such as Charles Heintz, Lorenzo, and Dutton Ranch that are today almost household names for North American wine lovers, their influence runs far deeper than many know.

Science at the service of art

For the Leightons, lost causes were an irresistible attraction, whether that was the old-vine Semillon growing in Livermore Valley’s deep gravel soils, a relic of 19th-century California wine pioneer Charles Wetmore; or the ambition to release wines only when ready to drink, with more than a decade of age on cork. Always eager to confound doubters, Terry and Frances even acquired two small parcels in humble Côte de Beaune lieux-dits in 1995, long before the recent explosion of all things Burgundian. Kalin Cellars was, in short, as the inaugural issue of The World of Fine Wine observed, “never about the money” (WFW 1, 2004, p.100.); and the Leightons’ uncompromising commitment to excellence meant that they were more interested in the one wine lover who understood 20-year-old Chardonnay than the 30 who didn’t. 

“Fine wine is a journey, not a destination,” was one of Terry’s many thought-provoking maxims, and the Leightons journey began in the 1970s, when they were invited to consult in their capacity as microbiologists for the JW Morris Port Works in Emeryville (where Dominique Lafon would intern a few years later). Winemaking piqued their interest, and Kalin Cellars was born shortly afterwards in 1975. From the beginning, reds were vinified in open-top Redwood vats and basket-pressed, and whites fermented in barrel, using methods modeled on artisanal practise in the European regions whose wines had captured the Leightons’ hearts as young graduate students. 

This commitment to a decidedly Old-World approach, which they juxtaposed to more commercial “Fast Wine,” was enduring, and while Terry and Frances both resolutely identified as scientists, science was firmly at the service of art; the Leightons’ aspiration was to better understand, and better control, time-honored practices, rather than any attempt to reinvent the wheel. Nothing was off limits, whether that was white wine fermenting for over a year in barrel, or four-year élevage for Cabernet Sauvignon. Indeed, one of the many glorious improbabilities that defined Kalin Cellars was that two North American children of the 1960s, Terry resolutely sporting a Fu Manchu moustache (as a young man, his band opened for The Doors), should have become unlikely guardians of the temple of traditional French winemaking. 

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the acclaim with which the Kalin Cellars wines were received combined with the Leightons’ insights as microbiologists led to a very discreet career in consulting. During this period, Terry and Frances advised well-known estates in Burgundy and Bordeaux that were experiencing problems with malolactic stability and stuck fermentations. It was during a tasting in Puligny-Montrachet, Terry recounted, that he became convinced of the importance of fully complete alcoholic and malolactic fermentation, as a way to avoid filtering for stability. Work in Pomerol also inspired a characteristically Kalin one-off bottling of Merlot in 1981. In this period, the Leightons also ran a biotechnology company, propagating and selling malolactic cultures to the likes of Williams-Selyem’s Burt Williams well before the existence of the dried malolactic isolates that are so readily available today.

Above and beyond

In the 1980s, Kalin Cellars throve, patronized by a celebrity clientele and served by the glass at the likes of Wolfgang Puck’s chic Michelin-starred Spago in Los Angeles. Kalin won lavish praise from Robert Parker, then in his heyday, who dubbed Terry an “eccentric genius” and lauded his Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Semillon, and Sauvignon Blanc as among the best produced in North America. “These wines approximate what Chambertin tastes like when made by the likes of Lalou Bize-Leroy,” raved Parker, suggesting that “anyone who is familiar with the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s magnificent 1980 La Tâche might want to try a bottle of Kalin’s Cuvee DD for comparison.”

North American wine culture was changing, however. In his reviews, Parker had observed that while many Californian Chardonnays tended to evolve rapidly, Kalin Cellars’ were only beginning to open up with four or five years in bottle. Yet an end to tax exemptions for winery inventory combined with an influx of new consumers who hadn’t grown up in a traditional wine culture meant that wines were being drunk younger and younger. Rather than change their approach to deliver more youthfully accessible wines, the Leightons’ solution to the problem was typically fundamentalist: they simply began systematically aging their wines before release. 

While that won them friends with consumers passionate about mature wines, and while aged bottles of Kalin opened many an eye to the true potential of California wine, this late-release policy also did something to marginalize the winery in a market increasingly oriented toward critical reviews of “the latest vintage.” Terry, of course, was just fine with that, a mentality exemplified by his series of so-called “stealth cuvées,” wines from particularly good selections of vineyards and grapes, often named in homage to important individuals in the Kalin pantheon such as Willy Joslin, the viticulturist at Wente Vineyards who had done so much to preserve the Livermore Valley’s old vines. These cuvées, which saw extended élevage and even later release, were “named after the aircraft [i.e. the Stealth Bomber],” Terry liked to say: “If you don’t see them coming you won’t see them going.”

In their last declining years, the pace of Kalin releases slowed and then stopped, but admirers of California’s most idiosyncratic winery will be pleased to know that several hitherto unsold vintages are still waiting in the wings. They will be a fitting tribute to a couple who certainly lived up to their credo: Never produce a wine with less character than yourself.

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