The triumphant tale of Burgundy’s comeback count

The late Becky Wasserman was the fairy godmother of modern Burgundy. She nurtured a whole generation or more of young vignerons there and sold their wines to an American market that was, eventually, extremely receptive.

In 2003, she told me about a young man in his twenties who had recently arrived in Vosne-Romanée to reclaim his family’s wine estate. The result was an article in the FT that the subeditors entitled, in a nod to the ’90s TV programme, “The French Prince of Belair”.

Louis-Michel Liger-Belair is not actually a prince but a count and, unlike many once-titled post-revolutionary Frenchmen, is supremely conscious of it. I caught up with him in April when he was in London introducing prospective buyers to his 2023s. I wanted to survey his journey from novice winemaker with only a handful of vines to someone with a good claim to being Burgundy’s éminence grise.

The impression I had, even more powerfully than when I first met him, was of someone haunted by penury, and the obligations of being the seventh Comte Liger-Belair. He is already thinking about what it will mean for his son to be the eighth.

The major event in his noble family’s history is their fall from owning more than 60ha of Burgundy’s finest vineyards, including one so glorious, La Romanée, that its name had been appended to that of the village, Vosne, the way Gevrey became known as Gevrey-Chambertin because of the status of Le Chambertin vineyard. They also owned a wine merchant so successful that in the 19th century they shipped serious quantities of wine to Russia, the US and Hong Kong.

But by 1933, during Prohibition in the US and the Great Depression, his family was forced to sell off almost everything, and their home in Burgundy, the Château de Vosne-Romanée, fell to rack if not ruin.

Louis-Michel’s father Henry was an army general, which meant a peripatetic upbringing for Louis-Michel. But at eight years old, he already knew he wanted to live in Vosne where the family spent their holidays. “I always knew the château was for me,” he told me.

He arrived in Vosne to make wine in 2000 as a 26-year-old, having studied oenology in Dijon, but with only a fraction of the family’s original vineyard holdings.

Over time, he has gradually reacquired the rights to grow, make and sell many of the original holdings including La Romanée, the two-acre Grand Cru just above the most famous, eponymous Grand Cru belonging to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC). He was inspired to convert to biodynamic viticulture in 2008, not by its many practitioners in the Côte de Beaune but by Noël Pinguet, then at Domaine Huet in the Loire.

The wines of the Domaine du Comte de Liger-Belair exhibit precision and increasing finesse and are now some of Burgundy’s most keenly sought.

To keep the wolf from the door, initially he qualified as a land valuer which has given him unparalleled access to the machinations of vineyard sales in the Côte d’Or, especially his northern sector, the Côte de Nuits. This has doubtless helped his estate expand at an unusually steady rate.

These sales are frequently the result of family disputes since the Napoleonic Code dictates that properties have to be inherited equally by all living family members and unanimity can be a rare commodity. Over the years, hearing on the bush telegraph about various deals in Burgundy, I have been amazed by how often Liger-Belair seems to have played a part. He is now so well known throughout the Côte d’Or that he deliberately shops anonymously in Dijon market north of it rather than in Beaune market in its heartland.

He admitted to being involved in LVMH’s purchase of the Grand Cru estate Clos des Lambrays. The entrée of a global conglomerate was by no means widely welcomed by all Burgundians but Liger-Belair’s comment to me was, “Well, at least they’re French.” But he is also relaxed about the recent influx of vineyard buyers from Asia and the US. “What happens in Burgundy today is what happened in Bordeaux 25 years ago. Anyway, it’s just the same as a century ago when rich American wives were sought by poor French noblemen.”

One particular recent personal coup was his 2021 deal whereby he has the right until 2050 to grow, make and sell some of the wines of the valuable Domaine Lamarche which has added considerably to his Premier Cru and Grand Cru holdings.

I asked him whether he had been inspired by the idea of restitution, or the appeal of Vosne, or the life of a vigneron. For the first time in our encounter, he paused, laughed ruefully and motioned towards a couch that might do for Freudian analysis. “Yes,” he admitted, “there was some notion of restitution. My father Henry was born in 1928 in one of the wealthiest families in Burgundy wine. The family company totally collapsed in 1933 and we became one of the poorest families. I wanted to restore our name back at the top of the wine firmament where it once was.”

When we met, Liger-Belair had just hosted a lunch for various Londoners making their way in wine or hospitality. “We need to ask them why they don’t drink wine so we can understand the future market better.” He likens his study of younger drinkers to chess. “You need to see two moves ahead.”

One move he has made to make burgundy more accessible is to open a wine bar in the sleepy village of Vosne, home to a bevy of world-famous wine producers. He has persuaded the locals to sell their wines with the most modest of mark-ups at La Cuverie de Vosne.

No discussion of burgundy can avoid the question of price. Thanks to limited supply and what was until recently unlimited demand, burgundy prices soared. La Romanée is priced at thousands of pounds a bottle on the secondary market, rivalling the wines of DRC.

I would have thought such prices would be hard to justify but Liger-Belair had a go: “Prices are so high now not because of me but because of the market. We need to have our share of the business because, apart from anything else, we need to think of the inheritance taxes on our children. For a merchant it takes two minutes to sell a wine. We need three years to make it.”

One addition to the estate in 2012 had been some Chardonnay vines in the Clos des Grandes Vignes Premier Cru in Nuits-St-Georges. I asked him whether, in view of the widely touted current move away from red to white wine, he wasn’t tempted to add more white-wine vineyards. He shook his head forcefully, cognisant of the fact that all of Burgundy’s best whites are grown south of his Côte de Nuits in the Côte de Beaune. “I don’t want to have vineyards that far away. I like to be able to see my vineyards from my terrace.”

He paused and observed, “Naming even five Burgundy estates that are really tip top in both colours would be difficult. And anyway, I’m from Vosne-Romanée!” Red is certainly his signature colour, down to all his trousers which vary, Sloane Ranger style, from pale pink to what he calls bordeaux red. “Useful for spills.”

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