AUBERT DE VILLAINE

From 1974 to the end of 2021 Aubert de Villaine shared the direction of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, at Vosne-Romanée, and in that time he also led the case that put the vineyards of Burgundy on the World Heritage List. Both pieces of work meet in November, at Beaune and at Meursault.

The Domaine

He was born in 1939, the son of a co-director of the domaine. His family has held half of its shares since 1887; the Leroy family has held the other half since 1942, and each family supplies one of the two directors. The domaine is some twenty-five hectares of grands crus: Romanée-Conti itself, La Tâche, Richebourg, Romanée-Saint-Vivant, Grands-Échezeaux and Échezeaux in the Côte de Nuits, and Montrachet and Corton in the Côte de Beaune.

He did not set out to make wine. He read literature and law, and spent nine months in New York, working among other things for Frederick Wildman, the domaine’s importer in the United States. In 1964 he met Robert Mondavi in California. “Sa vision des vins m’a boosté,” he said later: his view of wine spurred me on. He joined the domaine in 1965, at twenty-five. “Nous ne faisions pas un centime de bénéfices,” he remembers: it did not make a centime of profit, and only became profitable in 1972. In 1974 he took up the co-direction, with Lalou Bize-Leroy until 1991 and with members of the Leroy family after her.

The Work

His changes were made in the vineyard. The domaine was among the first in Burgundy to turn to organic farming, in 1985; in the 1990s it brought horses back to plough, to spare the soil the weight of tractors; in 2006 it moved to biodynamics. “Les produits chimiques tuaient cette vie du sol et il fallait apporter des engrais pour compenser: c’était contraire à l’idée de terroir,” he said: the chemicals were killing the life of the soil, and fertiliser had to be added to make up for it, which went against the idea of terroir.

He looked beyond Vosne. On 24 May 1976 he was one of the eleven judges at the Paris tasting that set French wines against Californian. In 1971 he and his wife founded their own domaine at Bouzeron, in the Côte Chalonnaise, where the de Villaines campaigned for a separate appellation for the village’s Aligoté, which became Bouzeron. In 2000 he became a founding director of HdV, Hyde de Villaine, in the Napa Valley. In 2010 Decanter named him its Man of the Year.

The Climats

The climats are the precisely bounded parcels of the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune, 1,247 of them, each known by the wine it gives. As president of the association Les Climats du vignoble de Bourgogne, he launched their candidacy for UNESCO, with Bernard Pivot, at the Hospices de Beaune sale of 2006, and the climats were inscribed in 2015. The Hospices entry in the Almanac records that launch; the French radio report on his retirement says the inscription “lui doit beaucoup”, owes him a great deal.

At the end of 2021, at eighty-two, he handed his share of the direction to his nephew, Bertrand de Villaine, who works beside Perrine Fenal of the Leroy family, and took a seat on the supervisory board. On independence he was plain: “Nous n’avons jamais eu la moindre approche d’investisseur: on n’ose pas.” No investor has ever approached the domaine; none dares. On the prices its bottles reach on resale he was plain too: the domaine traces its bottles, he said, to keep them for those who will drink them and not for speculators, and “Nous ne sommes pas complètement gagnants mais nous essayons.” It is not entirely winning, but it tries.

The Season

The Almanac places him at both ends of the Trois Glorieuses weekend. At Beaune, the sale under the Halles is where the Climats bid began. At Meursault, at the Paulée, he remembers bottles opened there: a Romanée-Conti of 1929, from vines never grafted, and a Musigny of Roumier’s from 1946. The Court counts him among the figures of the season for half a century at the direction of one small domaine, farmed for its soil, and for the case that put the slopes of the Côte on the World Heritage List.