Leroy, and What Biodynamics Bought

In 1988 Lalou Bize-Leroy converted her vineyards to biodynamics. In the Côte d'Or at that moment this was not a fashionable choice or even a respectable one; it was regarded as eccentric, and by some people as worse. She also cut yields to roughly half of what the appellation rules permit, and in some parcels well below that.

The wines that resulted are intensely concentrated, extremely rare and among the most expensive in the world. The interesting question is not the price but what the two decisions actually did, because between them they constitute the clearest natural experiment available on obsessive farming, and, as it turns out, an experiment that cannot be read cleanly.

Take yields first, since the mechanism is uncontroversial. Fewer bunches per vine means each one receives a larger share of what the plant produces, and the result is more concentrated fruit. It also means selling half as much wine off the same land, so intensity and cost rise together. Past a certain point, though, the result is density rather than detail, and that is a genuine stylistic criticism made of these wines by people who otherwise admire them enormously. Where that point sits is one of the real arguments in modern Burgundy, and nobody has settled it.

Biodynamics is the harder half, and the useful move is to separate the two things bundled inside it. The organic core (no synthetic herbicides, pesticides or fertilisers) is measurable, and its effects on soil life and root development are reasonably well evidenced. The preparations, the buried horns and the lunar calendar come from Rudolf Steiner and have nothing of that kind behind them. What both halves share is that they put a grower in the rows constantly, and attention is a real agricultural input. Several openly sceptical winemakers practise biodynamics and give precisely that reason, which is a more honest position than either side of the public argument usually manages.

What makes the whole thing impossible to assess properly is that the variables arrive as a package. Low yields, biodynamic farming, old vines, meticulous sorting, a small and highly motivated team, and very high prices that pay for all of it, all together. No domaine is going to farm half a parcel badly in order to establish a baseline. So the honest summary is narrow: the direction of travel has since been adopted across the Côte, and the wines at the top are better than they were in 1985. Attributing that to any single practice goes beyond what anybody can show.

The influence, by contrast, is easy to establish. Almost every serious domaine in the Côte has moved some distance in this direction over thirty years, and organic certification has gone from a fringe position to a substantial minority. A high-profile producer doing something unfashionable made it discussable, and a great many growers who remain entirely sceptical about the preparations have adopted the organic core anyway.

And then scarcity does its usual work. Tiny volumes mean few tasters, few tasters mean reputation travels by report, and reputations that travel by report are unusually stable. This is the same mechanism described in the previous chapter, and it is worth noticing that it applies identically to a domaine whose practices are admired and to one whose practices are merely expensive. The mechanism does not care which it is insulating.