Benjamin Leroux Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru ‘Hauts Jarrons’ 2022

Why is this Wine so Yummy?

Benjamin’s a fascinating character to follow. Every vintage his experience with the different villages and plots he sources fruit from grows. Winemaking is a gamble, every year you roll the dice and use knowledge gleaned over time to harness what nature has presented you in the form of grapes. Ben’s always has lovely touch and it’s showed from day 1 in the Côtes du Beaune.

Over the last couple of years Ben’s touch has extended from the Côtes du Beaune to the Côtes du Nuits. Each year I find the pleasure derived from both Côtes getting closer & closer to one and other.

Explore the Epic Line-Up & Enjoy!

Turns out Ben is good mates with Alex Moreau who I’ve spent a fair bit of time with in Australia and Burgundy. So much so he’s Godfather to Tom, Alex’s son!

I spent some time with Ben a couple of years ago. His high profile has not taken his head from the earth. He’s well and truly connected to the ground, both, by feet and focus. It was fascinating to hear him talk of the experiments he runs, the main influences on his winemaking over the past 10-15 years, his plans for the future, and, of course, the background to each the wines we tried. We recorded the audio for the session and share it in several podcasts below.

How to drink wine with Benjamin Leroux!

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About Benjamin Leroux

“You may remember that when I asked Allen Meadows, aka Burghound, on this video who he thought might be a natural heir to the late great Henri Jayer of Burgundy, one of the two people he cited was young Benjamin Leroux of Domaine Comte Armand.”

Jancis Robinson

“Leroux’s passion, ambition and sheer talent have already resulted in a number of stunning, beautiful wines, but my sense is that the best is yet to come.”

The Wine Advocate

Benjamin Leroux is widely considered to be one of the most gifted and knowledgeable wine growers in all the Côte d’Or. Born and bred in Beaune, Leroux has always been considered a prodigy, studying at the Lycée Viticole in Beaune from age 15 and taking the reins at the esteemed Domaine Comte Armand when he was just 24. Leroux would stay at Comte Armand for fifteen vintages, while simultaneously launching his eponymous négociant operation in 2007.

In 2014 Leroux left Comte Armand—in great shape, we might add—to concentrate on his young venture. The first stage of his evolution allowed him to establish the winery (in the old Jaboulet-Vercherre premises off the Beaune périphérique) and refine his ideas and understanding of the terroirs with which he wanted to work. The way Leroux structured this side of his business was highly innovative. His aim was to create the same quality standards of the finest domaines, despite not owning most of the vineyards. He has long-term relationships with the growers he works with, some of which he pays by land area rather than the quantity of fruit harvested. This allows him to dictate lower yields, ripeness, date of harvest, and so on. He only works with high-quality growers who plough or do not use herbicides or pesticides. Most are organic or biodynamic. For those that are not, there is an understanding that they will move to organics over five years.

Leroux’s knowledge of the Côte is encyclopaedic, and he has unearthed some very exciting, previously less well-known terroirs for his portfolio. It’s important not to underestimate how close Leroux works with these growers, as that is one of the keys to his ability to coax the finest fruit quality from the vineyards. He never buys juice or finished wine, only fruit; he nominates the harvest dates and will pick himself if necessary.

“He certainly has the gift of touch that seems to elevate everything from village crus to grand crus.”

Neal Martin, Vinous

In tandem with his excelling négociant business, Leroux has quietly been building up his family’s impressive domaine holdings, which now run to eight hectares. Though he worked these vineyards organically and biodynamically from the beginning, it took him several years to apply for organic certification, which came in 2016. Ben’s first vineyard purchase was a 0.16-hectare slice of Batard-Montrachet in 2009, though most of Leroux’s white vineyards lie in Meursault and include crown jewel parcels in Genevrières-Dessus and Charmes-Dessus. For the reds he farms his beloved Blagny 1er Cru La Pièce Sous le Bois, in Volnay Santenots and there are a number of small parcels in Vosne-Romanée.

In the Winery

For coming on 20 years, this has been one of the most dynamic cellars on the Côte in terms of winemaking. Leroux works with some 50 appellations and every wine has its own bespoke treatment according to the conditions of each vintage. This makes it difficult—and sometimes misleading—to try and generalise about the winemaking. We can say that the cellar is using more and more 600-litre, 1200-litre, and even larger casks for the whites, and more and more 450-litre to 600-litre barrels for the reds. It is also becoming moot to talk of new oak, of which so little is now used (especially for the whites). Likewise, to generalise about Leroux’s winemaking decisions, such as using whole bunches, is like trying to hit a moving target: in any given year, Leroux works with between 0% and 70-80%!

Since 2018, Leroux has used a cold room to preserve bunches overnight, at under 13°C, resulting in a cool, slow start to fermentation.

Every year this thoughtful and precise grower keeps hitting a higher bar, continually adapting to each vintage and the ever-changing climate. He remains one of the most talented and learned winegrowers in Burgundy, and although he can release as many as fifty different wines in any given year, they are all at an astonishingly high standard. Indeed, don’t be misled by the number of wines he offers. His smallest parcel is 0.06 hectares, and many of his sites are not much bigger: most wines are produced in the one-to-five-barrel range

Throughout the video below, and the podcast with Levi Dalton, Ben explores many aspects of his winemaking. One rule reigns supreme it’s all judged by taste, what’s in the glass. Whether it’s use of large wood, stalks, or whole berries he’s constantly experimenting to find ways to evolve.

Benjamin 🎧 spoke with Levi Dalton about the changes that have occurred to winemaking in Burgundy. Enjoy!

The 2022 Vintage at Leroux

From the Importer:

After the challenging, low-yielding 2021 season, 2022 was a blessing for Burgundy’s vignerons. It was a warm, very sunny and mostly dry vintage. The key to this relatively easy vintage was the reasonable yields, cool nights and a couple of good rain events at critical periods. All these factors helped moderate the warm weather and resulted in beautifully balanced fruit. Perfect ripeness was the norm, as were healthy crops and excellent vibrancy and freshness.

As for winemaking, Leroux now ferments and ages a whopping 50% of his white wine in large cask (foudre) and 20% of his reds (or 50% of reds if you include 500 and 600L in that calculation). He also has an ever-growing stash of Wineglobes (glass vessels), with which he’s getting great results. For the reds, he is using more and more 450-litre barrels, and any new 228-litre pièces are tempered with a white fermentation before being filled with red. He also works with minimal added sulphur, but with meticulous on-site testing as the wine ages. Extraction with the reds was on the light side — “We can’t plunge three times a day anymore,” — and the use of bunches was again adapted to each terroir; what works for Les Rugiens doesn’t necessarily work for Les Santenots.

Leroux’s captivating and beautifully aromatic 2022 red Burgundies purr with succulent textures, elegant tannins and appetising freshness. The whites offer freshness, density and the site transparency that we love from top Burgundy. They are reminiscent of 2002 or, more recently, 2020. For the reds, there is something of 1999, especially with the Côte de Beaune. In terms of recent years, they are clearly more layered and powerful than 2021, yet much more elegant than the recent warmer years of 2019 and 2020.

As a side note, almost one-third of Leroux fruit is estate these days. That represents eight hectares of estate vines (soon to be nine!) We have said this before, but the ability to source and produce such high quality from so many, mostly tiny, batches is Benjamin Leroux’s genius. Across the entire range, from Bourgogne to Grand Cru, 2022 marks a flat-out gorgeous vintage for Leroux and his team. These wines remind us why we buy, drink and obsess about great Burgundy. Period.

From Burghound:

Benjamin Leroux enthusiastically described 2022 as “one of those rare vintages where quality is as good in one color as it is the other! The growing season was hot but the key element was how dry it was. Thankfully, two factors largely offset these factors, which is to say that the nights were cool and that there was just enough rain to mostly avoid water stress in the vines. There was no disease pressure to speak of thanks to the mostly very dry conditions so it was, for example, much easier to manage than many recent vintages.

We picked from the 26th of August which was right about 100 days after the mid-point of the flowering. The fruit was ripe and spotless with good yields that ranged from 35 to 40 hl/ha in pinot and slightly higher in chardonnay, which is to say 40 to 45 hl/ha. In the same fashion, potential alcohols were solid but not really high at 13 to 13.5% in red and 12.6 to 13.5% in white.

I used about 30% whole clusters for some wines during the vinifications but touched up absolutely nothing as it seemed to me that the fruit had everything it needed to make for excellent wines. What I find so interesting is that despite the warmth and dryness of the growing season, the wines are not marked by it; in fact blind you might well think they were the product of a classic vintage.” I found much to like among Leroux’s 2022s, and in both colors (the whites will be reviewed in Issue 95), so they’re worth strongly considering. Leroux noted that all of the reds, save for the Bourgogne, will be bottled under natural cork. 

From Vinous:

“The 2021 vintage started with a mild winter, so vines started to move in March, which is now normal. So, bud burst was early in March when it was warm. What we feared happened. We had four nights of frost in a row with snow on the second night, which is impossible to fight against. We didn’t have enough candles for that length of time, so we used them to protect the Premier and Grand Cru. The snow did the real damage. Maybe in the future we will have to raise the level of the buds from the ground. We knew it would be a small crop in the beginning. It was a tough season. Those parcels that didn’t suffer frost grew normally, so there were kind of two vintages in one. When you have frost, you have to think about the next pruning in the following year. It was heaps of work. In June, it was a bit wet though the vines affected by frost were sensitive to oïdium that translated into more sprays, all organic here. We did three additional sprays and still managed to keep it to a low level.”

“The key was to not give up – it was as much about protecting 2022, to get the buds in the best condition to avoid the stress of the frost and keep the embryo inside the bud for the next year. It was constant work, seven days a week, spraying on shorter cycles, plus there was COVID in the background, so recruiting a bigger team was slower than normal. We started picking on 18 September in Bâtard-Montrachet and finished on 1 October with the Aligoté. Most of the whites were picked 23-27 September. There was just a bit of botrytis, but it was not dramatic. You cannot pick everything going down the row of vines, you have to laboriously look for the bunch, which takes time. We sorted the whites. When you have a small crop, you tend to save every grape, but in 2021, you had to sort the fruit, and we discarded around 10% of the white and red, including the lees.”

“It was difficult to ferment with such small volumes. We had more aging in regular pièce and 600-liters this year with no new oak. It’s a big surprise, the 2021. The lees were not looking great, so we used a minimum. That has paid off in the end. The reds were late down into barrel, and the barrel maturation is on just three to four liters of lees. The malolactic fermentations were late, and some cuvées did not finish until summer 2022. But as soon as they started becoming wines, I found that they had life and vibrancy. That was something I was not expecting from Bourgogne to Grand Cru. The reds are super stable, and I’m sure they’ll have a good life in bottle.”

Where in the World is Benjamin Leroux?

Leroux has parcels across both Côtes, making wines from Chassagne-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, Meursault, Auxey-Duresses, Savigny, Volnay, Pommard, Corton, Beaune, Vosne, Chambolle, Morey & Gevrey. He’ll almost certainly expand the list over time.