There are vineyards in Burgundy that announce themselves with walls, gates or a famous name discreetly carved into stone. Domaine Leroy announces itself rather differently.
Look across certain parcels of the Côte de Nuits in summer and the boundary can become visible before one knows exactly where it lies. Many neighbouring vines have been clipped into the familiar green rectangles of Burgundian viticulture, their growing tips removed as the season advances. Leroy’s can appear taller, looser and almost defiantly unkempt, their shoots continuing upwards before being bent, rolled or woven across the top of the trellis.
For Lalou Bize-Leroy, this is not untidiness. It is an argument.
Asked in 2023 about the conventional practice of summer hedging, or rognage, she answered with a characteristically memorable objection: “nous ne sommes pas chez le coiffeur” — we are not at the hairdresser.
Behind the joke lies a serious question. What happens when a grower rejects one of viticulture’s most routine gestures? And what happens when an approach once regarded as eccentric is subsequently adopted, adapted or investigated by some of Burgundy’s most ambitious growers — only for the region’s own research to suggest that its effects are considerably more complicated than either admirers or sceptics might wish?
This is not simply a story about biodynamics, nor quite a story about tressage, the increasingly conspicuous practice of retaining and weaving uncut vine shoots.
It is about the consequences of looking at a vine not as a production unit, but as an individual plant.
An individual, not a production unit
The Leroy family’s wine business is much older. Maison Leroy was founded in the nineteenth century. But the modern story of Domaine Leroy begins in 1988, when Lalou Bize-Leroy acquired substantial holdings from the Charles Noëllat estate in Vosne-Romanée.
The transaction brought extraordinary terroirs: Romanée-Saint-Vivant, Richebourg, Clos de Vougeot, Vosne-Romanée Les Beaux Monts, Nuits-Saint-Georges Aux Boudots and others. The acquisition of the Philippe-Rémy estate the following year added further grands crus, including Chambertin, Latricières-Chambertin and Clos de la Roche.
Yet prestige alone does not explain what followed.
The Noëllat vineyards included old vines and valuable Pinot Noir material propagated by massal selection. Rather than treating elderly plants as inefficient units to be replaced when their productivity declined, Leroy set about preserving them wherever possible. Dead vines were replaced individually. New plants could be propagated from the domaine’s own material. The goal was not a perfectly uniform vineyard but continuity.
That helps explain much else about Domaine Leroy.
The tiny yields for which it became famous are one expression of the same thinking. So is severe debudding. So is the attention paid to pruning and vine longevity. And so, eventually, is the refusal to cut off a healthy growing tip simply because vineyard convention expects a row of Pinot Noir to stop at a convenient height.
Leroy was also an extraordinarily early convert to biodynamic viticulture, although she was not Burgundy’s first. Jean-Claude Rateau had begun experimenting with biodynamics in Beaune in 1979. What Leroy brought was something different: visibility.
From 1988 onwards, biodynamic ideas were being applied without apology to some of Burgundy’s most scrutinised vineyards. Richebourg and Romanée-Saint-Vivant are difficult places in which to conduct an agricultural experiment unnoticed.
That experiment did not proceed without failure.
The mildew-ravaged 1993 vintage hit Domaine Leroy brutally. Production collapsed in some parcels, and the episode provided ammunition for neighbours already sceptical of the domaine’s methods. Later accounts indicate that spraying problems contributed to the severity of the losses.
The significance of 1993 is easily missed. Leroy’s viticulture has sometimes been absorbed into a romantic story of “natural” or hands-off farming. In practice, it demands almost the opposite: constant observation and enormous quantities of human labour. Biodynamic preparations coexist with permitted sulfur and copper treatments, careful disease management, debudding, individual vine replacement and painstaking pruning.
The philosophy is not really one of non-intervention. It is closer to a refusal to dominate the plant unnecessarily.
And that distinction matters when one arrives at the haircut.
Leroy herself dates her rejection of hedging to 1988. Contemporary evidence, however, suggests that systematic non-hedging became conspicuous around 1999 or the 2000 vintage. The apparent discrepancy may reflect a difference between the beginning of a conviction and its eventual application across the domaine, but without clarification from Leroy that remains an inference.
By the turn of the millennium, however, the visual result was unmistakable.
Instead of repeatedly removing the apex, shoots were allowed to lengthen before being bent, rolled or woven. In its modern form, this family of techniques is generally known as tressage.
The vine had stopped submitting to the haircut.
It had not, however, stopped being cut.
Winter pruning at Leroy is treated with enormous seriousness. The domaine has worked with Marco Simonit, whose pruning philosophy emphasises sap flow, restrained cuts and the preservation of permanent vine structure.
That apparent contradiction is revealing. The question is not whether to cut a vine, but why, where and with what consequence. A winter cut intended to preserve a plant for decades belongs to a different category, in this thinking, from repeatedly removing the active growing tip for convenience during summer.
If an old vine is valuable as an individual, one prunes differently. One replants differently. One manages its crop differently.
Eventually, one starts asking why a vineyard should look neat at all.
When the unruly vineyard became influential
Tressage was not invented at Domaine Leroy, and it would be difficult to establish a simple genealogy for its modern revival. Growers outside Burgundy were experimenting with comparable methods around the same period, while individual-stake training and tall vine systems have much older histories.
What Leroy unquestionably supplied was an extraordinarily visible example.
The clearest direct line runs to Charles Lachaux of Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux. Lachaux has acknowledged Bize-Leroy as an important mentor, and his own vineyards became famous for extremely high vegetation, arched shoots and a rejection of conventional hedging.
Elsewhere, Dugat-Py experimented with tressage in Mazis-Chambertin before applying it more widely. Olivier Lamy has explored unusually tall canopies. Jean-Marc Vincent has employed related ideas. Jean-Yves Bizot also avoids conventional hedging, although his system of individually staked vines is technically distinct.
They are not all Leroy disciples, and the distinction matters.
Ideas in Burgundy rarely move in a straight line from master to follower. They travel through observation, argument, visits between vineyards and simultaneous experiments with similar problems. There are even suggestions that some influence travelled back towards Leroy: accounts of Lachaux’s work with very tall supports and Simonit’s involvement at Domaine Leroy complicate any tidy story in which one visionary invents a method and the next generation simply copies it.
The more interesting legacy is cultural.
Leroy helped legitimise the act of questioning vineyard practices so routine that they had almost ceased to look like choices.
Why hedge at this particular height?
Why remove the apex?
Why replace an ageing block wholesale rather than vine by vine?
Why should every plant in a parcel be treated identically?
And why should a well-kept vineyard necessarily be a neat one?
For a time, such questions could be discussed primarily as matters of vine health, terroir expression or philosophy.
Then Burgundy became warmer.
Burgundy puts the idea to the test
Earlier budbreak, advancing harvest dates, drought, heatwaves and the difficulty of achieving physiological maturity without excessive sugar have changed the context in which canopy management is discussed.
Against that background, the attractions of a tall, unhedged vine appear obvious.
More vegetation might provide more shade. Preserving the growing apex can reduce the plant’s tendency to push lateral shoots. A larger functional canopy might, advocates suggest, allow flavours and tannins to develop without sugars racing ahead.
It is an appealing proposition.
Burgundy has now tested it.
Between 2022 and 2025, the Bourgogne Wine Board investigated a series of climate-adaptation strategies through its STRATAGÈME programme. Tressage was one of the vineyard practices examined.
The results are important precisely because they refuse to tell the story many people expected.
In trial parcels in the Yonne and Côte-d’Or, tressed vines tended to experience greater water stress, apparently because the larger leaf surface transpired more water. At harvest, the tressed fruit contained roughly 3.6 to 11 per cent more sugar than the controls in the reported examples. Potential alcohol rose. Total acidity tended to fall.
In one trial, potential alcohol was approximately 12 per cent in the conventionally managed vines and 13.3 per cent in the tressed ones.
That is not a trivial difference. More importantly, it runs in almost the opposite direction from the commonly repeated argument that tressage should help a warming Burgundy restrain sugar accumulation.
Nor did the experiments establish a simple cooling benefit from the additional vegetation. In vintages with strong fungal-disease pressure, denser canopies could make aeration and spray penetration more difficult.
There is also a less romantic constraint: money.
Adapting an existing vineyard for tressage can require expensive changes to trellising, and the BIVB estimated dozens of additional hours of work per hectare. Those economics look very different in a grand cru selling for extraordinary sums from those of a regional Burgundy.
That matters whenever Leroy is described as a blueprint.
A technique practised in Richebourg is not automatically a practical solution for the Côte d’Or as a whole.
And yet the scientific results do not close the case.
They make it more interesting.
When the numbers and the wine disagree
At Domaine Eleni et Édouard Vocoret in Chablis, a tressage experiment begun in 2022 produced results broadly consistent with the wider BIVB work. The tressed vines ripened faster and accumulated more sugar.
One response would have been to abandon the experiment.
Édouard Vocoret did not.
He preferred the wine.
His practical answer to the faster ripening was disarmingly simple: harvest the tressed section earlier. If the desired balance arrived five or seven days before the conventionally hedged vines, there was no requirement to pick both on the same date merely for the convenience of an experiment.
That observation changes the nature of the question.
Perhaps tressage should not be judged principally by asking whether two sets of vines contain the same amount of sugar on an arbitrarily shared harvest date.
Perhaps the more interesting questions are whether preserving the apex changes the plant’s developmental rhythm, whether the grower can exploit that change by choosing a different picking date, and what happens to the wine as a result.
There is physiological logic behind at least part of Leroy’s intuition. Removing the growing tip interrupts apical dominance and can stimulate lateral growth. Research elsewhere has shown that wrapping or retaining shoots can substantially reduce lateral shoot development compared with conventional hedging.
But that does not prove every claim subsequently attached to the practice.
There is no compelling evidence that non-hedging must produce deeper roots, that it will universally reduce sugar, that it necessarily improves drought tolerance or that it guarantees more balanced wine.
That distinction is crucial.
Lalou Bize-Leroy’s importance does not depend upon every one of her intuitions eventually being validated by viticultural science.
If anything, the opposite is more revealing.
She made Burgundy examine assumptions.
And wine itself ensures that those assumptions can never be tested one variable at a time. Nobody tasting a bottle of Leroy Romanée-Saint-Vivant or Richebourg can isolate the flavour of an uncut apex. The wine is the result of an entire system: old vines, genetic material, pruning, yields, soils, farming, harvest decisions, whole bunches, élevage and innumerable choices made during a season.
Tressage is not a tasting note.
It is one element in an agricultural philosophy whose consequences ultimately have to be judged in the glass, even when the glass cannot tell us precisely which decision produced what.
That is why Vocoret’s response is so useful. The laboratory produced one answer. The vigneron tasted another question.
The real Leroy blueprint
Domaine Leroy is therefore a blueprint only if one understands the word loosely.
It is not a recipe.
Few domaines could economically reproduce Leroy’s yields or labour requirements. High, tressed canopies will not necessarily behave identically in Chablis and Vosne-Romanée, on shallow limestone and deeper clay, in a wet year and a drought year. What benefits one parcel may be useless in another.
And copying the visible signs of a philosophy is much easier than reproducing its reasoning.
Yet Leroy has provided modern Burgundy with something more durable than a vineyard technique.
She demonstrated that habitual practice could be interrogated.
That may sound unremarkable now, when Burgundy contains a generation of growers willing to reconsider pruning architecture, planting material, soil cultivation, canopy height, harvest date and vine density. It was less obvious when many of these questions first began to appear in Leroy’s vineyards.
Climate change has made the habit of questioning still more necessary. A practice adapted to Burgundy’s twentieth-century climate cannot claim permanent authority merely because it is traditional. But neither should an unconventional practice become a new orthodoxy simply because its most famous practitioner makes extraordinary wine.
The recent research into tressage is valuable for precisely that reason.
It does not show that Lalou Bize-Leroy was right.
It does not show that she was wrong.
It shows that a question she made unusually visible remains worth asking.
Return, then, to the Côte de Nuits in summer.
The neighbouring vines may still look neater. And neatness carries its own quiet moral judgment: the straight row, the clean line, the disciplined wall of foliage suggest a vineyard properly kept.
Leroy inverted that judgment.
In her vineyards, the apparently unruly vine may have received more individual attention, not less. Its age may have been preserved more stubbornly. Its pruning may have been considered cut by cut. Its crop may have been adjusted vine by vine. Its growing tip may remain not because nobody has bothered to remove it, but because somebody has decided very deliberately not to.
That is the more interesting meaning of the Leroy vineyard.
The domaine’s most consequential contribution to contemporary Burgundy may not be biodynamics, tiny yields or tressage itself. It may simply be the permission to ask whether an apparently obvious gesture benefits the vine — or merely the person accustomed to making it.
More than three decades after Lalou Bize-Leroy began remaking the vineyards under her control, Burgundy is still arguing about the answer.
And in those conspicuously untrimmed rows, the vines continue to make the opening statement.
They are still refusing the haircut.