A White for the Pantheon

For nearly thirty years, the standing advice on 1997 white Burgundy has been the same two words: drink up. An overripe, low-acid year, generous early and gone soon — that was the verdict, and mostly the verdict was right. This bottle is the exception the verdict had to footnote: hailed at release as one of the stars of the vintage, and still, in 2026, proving the point.

Domaine d’Auvenay is Lalou Bize-Leroy’s personal estate — separate from Domaine Leroy, run from an old fortified farmhouse in Saint-Romain, four hectares in total, farmed biodynamically to her exacting standard. Her Chevalier-Montrachet parcel measures 0.16 hectares and yields a few hundred bottles a year; it is the summit of d’Auvenay’s whites and one of the rarest expressions of this vineyard in existence. Chevalier itself — the thin, stony slope directly above Le Montrachet — was met earlier in this archive through Leflaive; this is the same skeleton of a terroir through a very different, fiercer lens.

In the Glass

Pale gold, crystalline — a young colour on a bottle pushing thirty. The nose led with stone: wet gravel, saline crushed shell, the mineral register in front where most 1997s put fat. Behind it, pear, anise, and a fine spice from the élevage.

The palate carried the vintage’s ripeness as flesh, but with a concentration and focus the year had no right to produce — a precise mineral axis running through generous fruit, and then a finish, salty and endless, that kept renewing itself long after the swallow. Nothing faded, nothing drooping; a wine in complete possession of itself.

The Pantheon

Every serious drinker keeps a short private list. Mine, for whites, had held three experiences: DRC Montrachet 2006, Leflaive Montrachet 2002, Leflaive Montrachet 1999. This bottle joined them at the table — the personal pantheon of great whites, now four members, one of them from a vintage everyone was told to drink twenty-five years ago.

It was the opening act of an evening that continued through Dujac’s Bonnes-Mares and a magnum of Salon — distinguished company. It was not outshone.