Richard Leroy: Wines
Arriving back at the Grande Rue with Richard Leroy I was admitted to his garage, where a little over 30 barrels were stacked two-high. It doesn’t look that dissimilar to the old cellars at Le Pin, although on an even smaller scale; it was functional rather than grand, and there are a similar number of barrels per harvest. It is a garagiste operation, or at least it was – since I visited Richard has acquired new premises, just a short distance further down the street where he lives.
Fermentation here is en barrique, parcel by parcel mirroring the harvest, with the Clos des Rouliers and Noëls de Montbenault vineyards divided into two and four separate parcels respectively. Only indigenous yeasts are employed for the fermentation, and Richard has been pushing down his use of sulphur dioxide. Its use has always been most likely with bottling, for example the 2008 vintage – a very difficult vintage for Richard marked by a ridiculously low yields, as noted on the previous page – was protected with 2 g/hl. More recently, Richard has reached the point where, in certain vintages such as 2011 where the wines showed an aggressive reduction in their youth, he is happy to bottle his wines with no added sulphur dioxide. Indeed, he has not added any sulphur dioxide to any vintage since 2011.
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