Compare & Contrast - DRC & Leroy
BY NEAL MARTIN |
Dear reader, you are cordially invited to compare and contrast...
Case example 1: Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles; you may have heard of them. The latter broke more rules and captured the zeitgeist better than any other album before or after. From its iconic Peter Blake cover art to the thunderous E-major that climaxes “A Day In The Life,” this is the Fab Four’s masterpiece. Or is it? Surely Revolver has aged better. It sounds more relevant than its patchouli-scented, psychedelic follow-up, and nothing on Sgt. Pepper’s can match the pathos or lyricism of “Eleanor Rigby,” nor is there anything as sonically groundbreaking as “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Give me the affecting “Here, There and Everywhere” over the saccharine “When I’m Sixty-Four” any day of the year. But I’ll leave this for musos to discuss. Let’s get on to wine…
Few wine regions encourage and oblige comparisons like Burgundy. The abolition of primogeniture by the Code Napoléon fragmented the landscape into a mosaic of lieux-dits each baptized with individual names and quirky etymological origins: an inexhaustible source of fascination or frustration, depending on how convoluted you like your wine regions. For this writer and most Burgundy lovers, we revel in comparing the infinite conjugations of vineyard, grower and season, though current exorbitant prices restrict this to professionals or a tiny affluent minority. Music streaming allows anyone to compare two Beatles albums an unlimited number of times, free of charge, whereas two bottles of Burgundy wine are prohibitively expensive and can only be used once. So I cherished an opportunity to juxtapose two terroirs and two formidable winemakers at a dinner in Hong Kong, in a comparative tasting that attempted to answer one question: Why does Domaine de la Romanée-Conti taste different from Domaine Leroy?
Aubert de Villaine in June 2008. One of my favorite photographs, because it captures de Villaine’s solemnity.
Here are two intertwined iconic domaines, not least because Lalou Bize-Leroy was a shareholder and board member of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti alongside Aubert de Villaine until the early 1990s. Both are led by mononymous figureheads: Lalou and Aubert. Mention either, and anyone with an ounce of Burgundy knowledge will know exactly who you’re talking about. Both are based in Vosne-Romanée, though neither Lalou or Aubert would call that village their actual home. Both their wines rank among the most coveted and most expensive in the world.
Domaine Leroy has a geographically and hierarchically wide portfolio that encompasses Côte de Beaune and Côte de Nuits, from Village up to Grand Cru, whereas Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s vineyards mostly orbit Vosne-Romanée. There are only two vineyards farmed by both producers that allow us to make a direct comparison: Romanée-Saint-Vivant and Richebourg. (Technically, we could include Corton-Renardes, which Domaine de la Romanée-Conti currently rents from Prince Florent de Mérode; and from November 2018 onward, we might also include the three hectares of Corton-Charlemagne en fermage from Bonneau du Martray.)
Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Domaine Leroy. Each producer is an icon and has their own clearly distinguishable style. Why do they have so much in common, and yet are often so distinctive from each other? This article, based on a blind tasting of wines from the same vineyards and vintages, seeks to explain why. Time to compare and contrast.
