The Vosne End of Nuits

Nuits-Saint-Georges is really two villages with one name. South of the town, toward Prémeaux, the wines are dark, tannic and slow. North of it, where the slope runs up to the boundary with Vosne-Romanée, they take on some of the neighbour’s perfume and silk. Les Vignerondes lies in that northern sector, one row of vineyards in from the commune line, beside Aux Boudots; if a blind taster placed it in Vosne, few would argue.

Domaine Leroy’s parcel here is small — a little under four-tenths of a hectare — and came, like most of its Côte de Nuits holdings, from the purchase of Domaine Charles Noëllat in Vosne-Romanée in 1988, the year Lalou Bize-Leroy set up the domaine as a thing apart from the family négociant house. The estate has been farmed biodynamically from the beginning, with yields so low they have become part of the legend: individually tied vines, no hedging, a handful of tiny bunches per plant, and wines whose density owes nothing to extraction and everything to what was left on the vine. There is a fuller account of the domaine alongside its Clos de la Roche 2008 in these pages.

A Cool, Honest Year

2001 in the Côte de Nuits was neither the drama of 2003 nor the easy ripeness of 2002. A wet, uneven summer was rescued by September sunshine, and the growers who had cut their crop hard made wines of classical proportions — firm, fresh, more about line than flesh — that took a long time to come round and were, for years, undervalued for it. At a domaine that never carried much crop in the first place, the cool year was less of a handicap than elsewhere.

The bottle carried the estate’s usual dress: a plain label that says almost nothing, a red wax capsule, and a small white neck seal with the vintage written across it in a copperplate hand.

In the Glass

Poured second at a counter dinner, after the Colin-Morey Narvaux and before its Côte de Nuits neighbour, the Bellene Suchots 2012, at twenty years from the vintage.

The colour was a translucent garnet, browning gently at the rim. The nose was where the domaine’s signature announced itself: an intensity of aroma out of all proportion to the colour, with anise and dried rose, red cherry gone toward kirsch, cold tea, a sappy, stemmy green note and something like sandalwood underneath. It changed every few minutes and did not stop changing.

The palate was medium-bodied and dense in the particular way Leroy’s wines are dense — not heavy, but packed, with more flavour per sip than the weight of the wine suggests. The tannins had resolved into a fine, dry grip, the acidity was bright and intact, and the finish went long on spice and forest floor, with the Vosne-like perfume returning at the very end.

At twenty it was fully open and nowhere near tired. Nuits from the Vosne border, at a domaine that treats a premier cru with the seriousness other people reserve for grands crus, in a year that has aged better than its reputation. The town’s other, harder side is elsewhere in this archive — Boillot’s Pruliers 2011 — and the same border from a different cellar in the Liger-Belair Aux Cras 2015.