And yet buyers of Domaine Leflaive’s
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 3:30 am
At $ 100 a bottle, Domaine Leflaive Bourgogne 2019 was by far the most expensive wine of my tasting. And yet, for the co-owner and general manager of Domaine Leflaive, Brice de La Morandière, it is “the cheapest good wine you can buy”.
Leflaive Bourgogne was a beautiful, lush wine, but a bit dominated at the moment by (new) oak. This wine receives the same attention as the four-figure grands crus of the cellar. “We don’t do anything different in the cellar,” explains Mr. de La Morandière.
grands crus like Le Montrachet aren’t necessarily looking for a good, inexpensive wine, according to Geoffrey Troy, Burgundy expert and owner of the New York Wine Warehouse in Long Island City. “Our ultra-rich buyers are not buying Bourgogne Blanc,” he wrote in an email. “It’s below them.” He added that he found it sad. The buyers of Domaine Leflaive Bourgogne at Wine Warehouse are “low budget” wine drinkers who cannot afford the wines of Leflaive village, which cost hundreds of dollars. As one of those budget buyers, I admit the $ 100 price tag got me thinking. But if I were to spend three figures on a Burgundy, I would spend it on the Leflaive.
A few of the other wines on the tasting weren’t quite up to phone number library the mark, including a bottling from Olivier Leflaive, who left Domaine Leflaive in 1994 to start his own eponymous cellar. The Bourgogne Blanc Olivier Leflaive Les Sétilles 2019 ($ 22) was a Bourgogne Blanc different from the others: simple and pleasant and perfectly pleasant but a bit of a footnote.
This is the biggest challenge in buying a wine labeled Bourgogne Blanc: The wines are so different from one producer to another. The best wines in my tasting were an ideal combination of talent and source, and I would recommend buying as many bottles of these 2019 Bourgogne Blancs as possible. This is all the more important since there is perhaps a lot less Burgundy: as I finished reporting this column, I learned that the 2021 Burgundy harvest had been even more difficult than 2019, but without also positive results. It is perhaps one of the smallest Burgundy harvests ever recorded. How much wine is made – and how much it will cost – has not yet been known. A $ 100 Burgundy may seem cheap in retrospect.
Leflaive Bourgogne was a beautiful, lush wine, but a bit dominated at the moment by (new) oak. This wine receives the same attention as the four-figure grands crus of the cellar. “We don’t do anything different in the cellar,” explains Mr. de La Morandière.
grands crus like Le Montrachet aren’t necessarily looking for a good, inexpensive wine, according to Geoffrey Troy, Burgundy expert and owner of the New York Wine Warehouse in Long Island City. “Our ultra-rich buyers are not buying Bourgogne Blanc,” he wrote in an email. “It’s below them.” He added that he found it sad. The buyers of Domaine Leflaive Bourgogne at Wine Warehouse are “low budget” wine drinkers who cannot afford the wines of Leflaive village, which cost hundreds of dollars. As one of those budget buyers, I admit the $ 100 price tag got me thinking. But if I were to spend three figures on a Burgundy, I would spend it on the Leflaive.
A few of the other wines on the tasting weren’t quite up to phone number library the mark, including a bottling from Olivier Leflaive, who left Domaine Leflaive in 1994 to start his own eponymous cellar. The Bourgogne Blanc Olivier Leflaive Les Sétilles 2019 ($ 22) was a Bourgogne Blanc different from the others: simple and pleasant and perfectly pleasant but a bit of a footnote.
This is the biggest challenge in buying a wine labeled Bourgogne Blanc: The wines are so different from one producer to another. The best wines in my tasting were an ideal combination of talent and source, and I would recommend buying as many bottles of these 2019 Bourgogne Blancs as possible. This is all the more important since there is perhaps a lot less Burgundy: as I finished reporting this column, I learned that the 2021 Burgundy harvest had been even more difficult than 2019, but without also positive results. It is perhaps one of the smallest Burgundy harvests ever recorded. How much wine is made – and how much it will cost – has not yet been known. A $ 100 Burgundy may seem cheap in retrospect.