Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair

The Liger-Belair family settled in Vosne-Romanée when Comte Louis Liger-Belair, napoleonic general, acquired the Château de Vosne in 1815. The Domaine grew considerably under the general’s direction and that of the Comte Louis-Charles, his son, amounting to more than sixty hectares principally in the Côte de Nuits with ownership of some of France’s most prestigious appellations: the monopoles of La Romanée, La Tâche, La Grande Rue, a large portion of Malconsorts, parcels of Chaumes, Reignots, and Suchots in Vosne-Romanée, Saint Georges and Vaucrains in Nuits-St.-Georges, Clos de Vougeot and Cras in Vougeot, Chambolle, Morey, as well as Chambertin. When Comte Henri Liger-Belair, grandson of the Comte Louis-Charles, died in 1924 he left a wife and ten children in possession of twenty-four hectares of vines and the Château. The Domaine held together until the death of the Comtesse Liger-Belair in 1931. Inheritance law at the time stated that all children had to be of age in order to distribute the inheritance or the estate must be sold. Sadly some family members could not wait for the two Liger-Belair minors to come of age and on August 31st 1933, at the town hall of Vosne-Romanée, the vineyards were auctioned off. The children witnessed the departure from their patrimony of La Tache, the Malconsorts, the Brûlées. However, two of the children, a priest, and his brother, the Comte Michel, Louis-Michel’s grandfather, banded together to buy back La Romanée, Reignots, and les Chaumes. The vineyards were entrusted to local vignerons, and sales to Burgundian negoçiants. The Comte Michel died in 1941, during the war, before he could redevelop the Domaine. His son, the Comte Henry, Louis Michel’s father, who enlisted in the army and rose to rank of general, managed the Domaine by leaving vineyard work to sharecroppers, and commercialisation to various shippers. Since 2000, his son the Comte Louis-Michel controls all aspects of production from vineyard to bottle and has in a short time steered the Domaine back into the top echelons of Burgundian winegrowing.

2017 Vintage

Louis-Michel is very clear about the two keys to success in this vintage. Yields and ageing time in barrel. Ripeness was not an issue, in his words “there was time to pick and to get ripe fruit, even with high yields, but if you did not control quantities the wines will be a little diluted.” Having restricted yields and having picked ripe fruit, the second major watch-out was to monitor ageing and be sure to capture the beautiful, generous fruit that is the hallmark of the 2017 vintage. So the wines were racked a couple of months earlier than normal in preparation for bottling between the end of 2018 and early spring 2019 depending on the cuvée. Quite rightly delighted with the results Louis-Michel thinks “there’s a real feeling of freshness in these 2017s, even though acid is not so high.” This is the sort of stellar range we have come to expect from the Domaine, ranking as one of the most exciting 2017 tastings we had. These are great wines but very Burgundian wines too - delicate, vibrant, deep but never at the expense of elegance or balance. The textures are sumptuous, typical of the estate’s wines, yet each displays such individual personality and unique characteristics; it is this combination that mark out the wines of Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair as something really very special.

2018 Vintage

The great thing about Louis-Michel Liger-Belair is that his base principles of viticulture and winemaking (biodynamics, light extraction or nonintervention winemaking) are overlaid by a reflectiveness and adaptability. An understanding that not every year is the same and a desire to work with the conditions to make the best version of a vintage possible, rather than attempt to artificially re-write the season. Generally, this is not a domaine considered too obsessed with whole-bunch fermentation but where it is needed, in a given wine in a given year, it is employed judiciously. In 2018 Louis-Michel felt it was beneficial to do this for the Grands Crus and Clos des Grandes Vignes, but only within certain limits, employing no more than 20% in any cuvée. The rest of the wines remained the result of a classic, de-stalked fermentation. Typically, the wines are very gently extracted here, more like infusions, and this played well to a vintage where grapes contained a lot of tannin and sugar. Another key to the vintage, as far as Louis-Michel is concerned, was retaining as much freshness in the wines as possible. These wines will usually do their malolactic fermentation in cask and stay there, untouched, until preparation for bottling in spring. Louis-Michel felt that racking some of the 2018 wines before the following harvest, much earlier than usual, has contributed hugely to the wines maintaining their energy and shape. Bottling will, therefore, be brought forward for these wines too, most likely to late winter 2020. The best compliment we can pay the estate is how their 2018's are so individual and so faithful to their terroirs. The greatest practitioners of whole-bunch fermentation employ the method to add spark to the final wine but as invisibly as possible. This is not a technique that should dominate vintage or terroir and Louis-Michel has very much succeeded in this regard. As flattering as these wines will be in their youth, they show tremendous restraint, a coiled energy keeping the vintage’s natural opulence at bay. You’ll be hard pushed to find 2018's as refined and seductive as these.

2019 Vintage

The 2019 allocations are expected later in January / early February. 2019 was not a season of important climactic events, rather a collection of small episodes that in themselves did not present huge challenges to potential yields, but collectively added up to a small crop. “Small” meaning half of what was produced in 2018. Yields ranged from between 18hl/ha to 22hl/ha – the expectation in a normal year would be 35hl/ha. As for the quality, Louis-Michel terms it an “amazing” year and “one of the top vintages we have made”, likening it to a mix of 2010 and 2006, the latter being a particularly successful one for Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair. There were heat spikes and drought, which are becoming norms in these times of global warming, but Louis-Michel feels well-equipped to combat these with organic farming, which forces the roots deep to find water. Adapting canopy management to provide shade to the bunches is another weapon in the armoury, as well as having a big enough team to be as reactive as possible in the vineyards when needed. Crucially, harvest benefited from what Louis-Michel calls “the cool sun of September”, when sunny days and cool nights allowed for phenolic maturity and retention of acidities in the grapes. Picking began on the 16th September, a fairly “normal” timing, or even late by recent standards. In the winery very little changes, the approach is hands-off. If there is any small adaptation in 2019, a slightly higher percentage of whole bunches were fermented than usual (25%) on the clay terroir Premiers Crus – Clos des Grandes Vignes, Suchots and Chaume, and also for the Grands Crus Echézeaux and La Romanée. The aim is to give a feeling of freshness to the wines, as well as adding aromatic complexity. The 2019s are a perfect example of what Louis-Michel is looking for every year – they show well as young wines with sensual, floating textures, but have the complexity and balance to suggest great ageing potential.

2020 Vintage

2020 was a small crop here with yields averaging between 18 and 20 hl/ha, similar to 2019, which was half of what was produced n 2018. Despite the natural intensity and concentration of the vintage, Louis-Michel has succeeded in his goal of making wines that are digest and that you want to drink. Terroir resonates through this range, more than the hand of the winemaker, and as much as they are deep and textured, they have a crisp verticality too and a lively freshness. Other than that generalisations are futile, as each wine offers something different and complete. As usual the wines are destalked, apart from the clay-based 1ers and Grands Crus, which can include up to 20% whole bunch fermentation giving the wines some shape and energy. A couple of the wines were unavailable to taste due to the timing of their elevage stage, so full notes have not been written on these. The wines will be released in March 2022.

2021 Vintage

“Born in a crystal and ended in a crystal” is how Louis-Michel poetically summarises the 2021s; referring to the frost at the beginning of the season, and then the final result – wines of beautiful, crystalline transparency. The season was not too hard fought, there were “normal challenges” as he describes them, adding that the difficulty was more a question of keeping morale up “it was tough for everyone to work just as hard for half the amount.” Indeed, it was a small vintage here, crop losses ranging from 40–90 percent depending on the plot; the most extreme examples being the Vosne 1ers Crus of Petit Monts, Chaume, Suchots and Brûlées, which produced so little that they had to be blended together – forming a wonderful, if poignant, Vosne 1er Cru cuvée: “something I never want to have to do again” LouisMichel emphasised. There was no change to the winemaking, the only notable point being that the malos were a little longer and slower than usual. Everything was de-stalked, apart a small portion of the Vosne 1er Cru blend, Clos des Grandes Vignes, Echézeaux and La Romanée as usual. All of the wines up to and including the Vosne 1er Cru will be bottled first, with the rest receiving an extra couple of months’ élevage. These are beautiful, classic burgundies of great elan and transparency.

2022 Vintage

2022 is an exciting vintage for Louis-Michel Liger-Belair as it sees the return to the fold of Malconsorts after an 89 year absence, not to mention the addition of parcels in Suchots, Grands Echezeaux, Croix Rameau, Clos de Vougeot and Echezeaux - all coming from Domaine Lamarche. These hotly-anticipated new comers aside, 2022 is a thrilling vintage in its own right; these make for some of the very finest wines we have tasted from barrel at the domaine. Louis-Michel considers 2022 to be a very benign season that presented little in the way of challenge. Qualifying this, he says “Everyone knows how to play the hot vintages. High canopy for shade, rigorous sorting, picking date” - essentially business as usual. Harvest here, incidentally, was 30th August. If there has been a little adaptation it has been racking many of the wines earlier than usual, a process he wishes to have completed before getting too deeply into the cold of winter, “in order to capture their beautiful, expressive fruit.” Indeed these wines strike a glorious balance of finesse and energy - they are stylish but animated, each resonating with its own clear terroir identity.

2023 Vintage

The sort of stellar line-up we have come to expect from a domaine at the very top of its game, the 2023s here show the very best side of the vintage – silky textures, ripe fruits and a poised freshness combining in perfect harmony. Louis-Michel Liger-Belair considers harvest date and yields to be the two keys to success in ‘23. He pointed out that in the village of Vosne alone, vintage spanned over six weeks – starting on the 28th August and finishing as late as October – so you can only imagine the potential disparity in style and quality. Not here, though, for right across the range these consistently deliver stylish textures, bright, open fruit, and vineyard nuance. The potential crop was abundant and Louis-Michel remarked that green harvesting was important and crucially, had to be carried out in July. “August was too late, as all that happens is the sugar levels increase but the fruit ripeness does not,” he told us. “This was even more important in 2023 when a late heatwave concentrated the grapes, and therefore the sugars, but if the fruit was not ripe, you also concentrate the effect of the green tannins.” The other danger in this vintage, he added, was picking fruit that lacked freshness. Natural alcohols here span from 12.8 degrees to 13.5. Viticultural know-how and perfectly judged picking dates have resulted in the best range of reds we tasted in 2023 - they are jubilant, graceful and designed for pure pleasure.