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86 chapter six The Burgundians His approach can be summed up in the classic saying of the Burgundian vigneron: Laissez le vin de se faire (loosely translated as “Let the wine make itself”), which sets down the overarching rule that one must not disturb nature, that man’s role in the process is shepherd rather than master, that if we work with and respect the vagaries of nature and do our best to provide the proper conditions under which the fruit grows and matures, the result will be splendid. —Neal Rosenthal, Reflections of a Wine Merchant One afternoon in late July 2001, hundreds of wine aficionados arrived at Dillin Hall on the verdant, stately campus of Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. The occasion was the annual International Pinot Noir Celebration, a three-day wine-tasting extravaganza that brings together collectors, critics, merchants, dealers, winery owners, and vintners, all willing to pay close to one thousand dollars per ticket. For the seminar on this afternoon, tables placed end-to-end, draped in white cloths, and set with tasting sheets, glasses, water bottles, spit cups, and baskets of crackers filled the space with long rows of white. The audience pushed in excitedly and competed for the seats with the best views of the south side of the hall. On a small stage here were two highly regarded American critics: the Wine Spectator columnist and author Matt Kramer and Pierre-Antoine Rovani, who was at that time Robert Parker’s associate at The Wine Advocate. In addition, Laurent Montalieu, the tall and affable Bordeaux-born then-winemaker for WillaKenzie Estate in Yamhill, stood by to act as translator. Each of the gentlemen present was a lion in his own right, but the crowds strained to see another, much smaller figure: a certain Madame. She was none other than Lalou Bize-Leroy, the powerhouse behind the wineries Domaine d’Auvenay and Domaine Leroy and a shareholder in Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. A woman known to wear a fur coat and heels in the cellar, Bize-Leroy has a birdlike prettiness, her blonde hair often pulled back in a tight ponytail with The Burgundians 87 her bangs falling forward like a few loose feathers. A spritely sixtynine at the time, she was a world-class mountain- and rock-climber, with a sinewy strength that was belied by her slight size. Bize-Leroy has been a force to reckon with since the mid-1950s, when she took over the management of her father Henri’s négociant house;shethenmadehernameasaquality-drivenwinemakerduring the 1980s, when she was codirector of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), cementing its reputation for making the finest red wines in the world. By the late ’80s, Leroy was acquiring her own vineyards with the help of investors; today, her Domaine Leroy in Vosne-Romanée and her Domaine D’Auvenay in St.-Romain produce astonishing wines that fetch prices of up to $2,500 a bottle. She stepped away from her role as cogérante at DRC in 1992 to focus on her own estates, but remains a shareholder. Because of those high prices, and—it cannot be doubted—because of her gender, her diminutive size, her great strength, and her obsessive drive, Bize-Leroy had achieved a legendary wine-world status, exemplified by the nickname “La Tigresse.” Thanks to her adherence since 1989 to the arcane practices of biodynamics, some have even seen her as a sorceress, an alchemist who can cast magic spells over hopeless vineyards and turn them into gold. “I think Lalou’s presence here was really like the oracle at Delphi coming down from the mountain,” recalls Matt Kramer. “Lalou is more myth than woman. People were just fascinated to lay eyes on this near-mythological creature. It is hard to exaggerate how much Lalou is talked about and how little she is seen or heard.” Or, at their astronomical prices, how little her wines are tasted. But today, here were three 1999 Leroy grand crus (the Corton-Renardes, the Clos de la Roche, and the Latricières-Chambertin), waiting in elegant Riedel stemware for hundreds of lucky IPNC ticket-holders to try. “Her wines, of course, were breathtaking,” Kramer continues. “It’s one of those things where they are so goddamn breathtaking that there’s nothing you can really identify in them. It’s just not available to you. It’s Burgundy at its pinnacle. People just tasted the wine and said, ‘Oh, my...

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