Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair: Producer profile & 10 wines rated

‘To know where you are going, you must know where you’ve come from,’ commented Louis-Michel Liger-Belair as we began our most recent tasting. His level of success, however, requires more than self-knowledge, and the talent and hard work of the present generation deserves no small share of the credit.

Scroll down for Charles Curtis MW’s notes and scores of 10 wines from Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair

History of the domaine

The domaine was founded in 1815 by Louis Liger-Belair, a general under Napoléon, and grew under the administration of his adopted son Louis-Charles, who married Ludovie Marey of the venerable Marey family of winegrowers.

By the death of his son Edgar, the family domaine had reached 60ha, including sole ownership of La Romanée, the original La Tâche, La Grande Rue and many other vineyards. Edgar’s son Henri passed away in 1924, and his wife Suzanne retained ownership until her death in 1931.

At this point, the story takes a darker turn. Comte Henri and his wife were survived by 10 children, two of whom were not adults at the time of her death. Not all of the siblings were content to wait until the rest were adults for the settlement of the estate.

In this case, French law compels the estate to sell the assets and disburse the funds – all vineyards were to be sold at auction. Luckily, the eldest son Michel (Louis-Michel’s grandfather) and his brothers, Philippe and Just, pooled their resources to save vines in Vosne-Romanée premier crus of Les Chaumes and Aux Reignots, as well as their magnificent grand cru monopole La Romanée from the auctioneer’s gavel.

Sadly, Count Michel passed away during the Second World War and his son Henri joined the army in 1947, eventually rising to the rank of general. During his long military career, he rented the vines out to sharecroppers, including the Michaudet family, then three generations of the Forey family.

These sharecroppers made the wine, which was then bottled and marketed by négociants. The most well-known of these was Bouchard Père et Fils, who sold La Romanée from the mid-1970s until it was retaken by Liger-Belair beginning in 2002, but the wine has also been marketed by C. Marey et Liger-Belair, Edouard Delaunay, Thomas-Bassot, Maison Leroy and Maison Albert Bichot.

Comte Henri’s son, Louis-Michel, was born in 1973. He describes his childhood as ‘excessively happy’ while noting that his father the general insisted he ‘always do better’.

Although the family moved often, they would return for the summer to work on their château in Vosne-Romanée, and Liger-Belair recalls many happy hours, announcing at age eight that he would take over the château and become a vigneron.

Perhaps remarkably, his father did not oppose him but insisted on a rigorous education. Louis-Michel complied, completing degrees in agricultural engineering and oenology and a master’s degree in business before training in Gevrey with Rossignol-Trapet.

Diversity of the heritage

Training complete, Liger-Belair set about recovering his family vineyards from their métayage (sharecropper) agreements. His first vintage was 2000, and he made the wines from the village-level Vosne vineyards Clos du Château and La Colombière, which are adjacent to the château, and premier cru Vosne-Romanée Les Chaumes. He began producing Aux Reignots and La Romanée in 2002.

In 2006, he expanded his range with a métayage agreement with the Lamadon family, who had previously been sharecroppers for his father.

The Lamadons owned 5.5ha of vines, including the parcels in Echézeaux, as well as the Vosne-Romanée premier crus of Les Suchots, Les Petits Monts and Les Brûlées, and in the Nuits-St-Georges premier cru Aux Cras, along with some village-level vines in Vosne-Romanée and Nuits-St-Georges, including Aux Lavières, opposite Aux Murgers in the northern side of the village near Vosne.

In 2012, he acquired the Clos des Grandes Vignes monopole from the Château de Puligny. This vineyard is also in the Nuits appellation, but in the village of Prémeaux-Prissey, east of the Route Nationale (the only premier cru in Burgundy so located).

The jewel in the crown is the Lilliputian grand cru La Romanée, a monopole of the domaine. La Romanée is the smallest appellation in France and lies just up the slope from Romanée-Conti as the vines climb more steeply toward their summit.

The vineyard owes its existence to the Liger-Belair family, since in the 18th century only a portion of it was called En La Romanée. It was not one vineyard, but at least six (or more) small parcels. One of these was the property of the wife of the first Comte Louis, and the balance of the parcels were purchased by his son Louis-Charles.

Continuing further up the slope towards the wood brings one to Aux Reignots (or Raignots), named for the footpath that leads to the Abbaye de St-Vivant de Vergy in the Hautes-Côtes; here the angle is steeper and the soil thinner.

Unlike La Romanée, Aux Reignots is not a monopole; however, Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair is by far the largest owner, with a total of 0.73ha, including one large parcel just above La Romanée and 3.6 ares leased from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. In style, the wine has a diamond-like finesse and brilliance as opposed to the richness and luxury of La Romanée in recent vintages. The wines are completely different, yet both are lovely.

Changes in the vines and the wines

Since he first began to re-establish the family domaine, Liger-Belair has demonstrated a strong commitment to working in harmony with nature. He has been ploughing with a horse since 2002 and practising biodynamics throughout the vineyard since 2008. The estate has been certified organic since 2011 and biodynamic (by Biodyvin) since 2012.

Louis-Michel believes in continuous improvement but notes that one can only change some things over time. He describes the process as thus: ‘Making a wine is much more than winemaking. It is 250 small decisions. If one puts 10 decisions on the table each year and decides how to improve, then in 25 years, one will have addressed all 250 small decisions.’

Over time, these decisions have led to the development of a distinctive Liger-Belair style. Louis-Michel points out that in 2003 he still had the assistance of Henri Jayer, and as they worked through the massive heatwave of that year, they slowly began to reduce the number of punch downs in the winery.

By 2009, Liger-Belair had bought a new grape press and stopped, or at least greatly reduced, the number of times the grapes were punched down. Today, the estate uses a vertical press for the reds and a horizontal press for the whites. Much of the Pinot is destemmed, but the proportion of whole clusters is slowly increasing.

The grapes are cooled to allow a maceration before fermentation, which is done at a relatively warm temperature. The wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered, with minimal sulphur.

Continued growth

It was announced at the end of 2021 that the Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair would begin to farm the vines belonging to Nathalie Pacareau, the cousin of Nicole Lamarche. Lamarche took over the winemaking when her father retired in 2007. Following his passing in 2013, she and her cousin Nathalie assumed the direction of the family estate.

By the end of 2021, however, Pacareau had decided to join forces with Liger-Belair, thereby adding more than 2.5ha of prime vineyards. The holdings include more than a hectare of grand cru, including those in the Clos de Vougeot (near the château), Grands-Echézeaux and Echézeaux (Champs Traversins), plus another hectare of premier cru territory, including Suchots, Malconsort and La Croix Rameau.

The rapprochement with the Lamarche estate added volume. It also pleased Liger-Belair deeply because the holdings in Malconsorts and Grands Echézeaux were similar to parcels his family owned before the sale of their estate – it was almost as if they were coming home.

A commitment to Vosne-Romanée

The Vosne-Romanée village-level wine from Liger-Belair is a blend of 13 different parcels, vinified separately and assembled after blending. It is a true reflection of the Vosne terroir, unique to Liger-Belair: ‘I am an artist like any other, and enjoy the possibility that many producers can work from a similar palette and end up with a completely different result,’ says Louis-Michel. Yet his work is inimitable.

The Liger-Belair family has been in Vosne for over 200 years. Louis-Michel remains devoted to the village, noting that he had an opportunity to expand to other parts of the Côte d’Or but chose to focus on Vosne and devote himself to the village that had given him and his family so much.

He declined to farm a parcel of Chambertin because he wasn’t from Gevrey: ‘My clients are here for wines from Vosne.’ Liger-Belair explained that terroir is not only the sub-soil, soil, vine material and climate, but also the history of the place – who planted what and how it was managed. It is the history of the vignerons, a history deeply intertwined with that of his family. Few villages are fortunate enough to have such an eloquent defender.

See Charles Curtis MW’s notes and scores of 10 wines from Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair

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