Domaine Georges Noellat Vosne-Romanee 1er Cru "Les Chaumes"

When Maxime Cheurlin took his first harvest in 2010 at age twenty, the entire domaine had spent the previous two decades selling its fruit in bulk to Jadot and Drouhin — meaning every bottle of Noëllat in circulation today was built from scratch by a single young winemaker who is, by blood, a cousin of the Jayer lineage. Les Chaumes sits on the southern flank of Vosne-Romanée's Premier Cru belt, where classic argilo-calcaire (clay-limestone) soils deliver the Côte de Nuits signature: the limestone fraction provides drainage and aromatic precision while the clay fraction adds mid-palate density and concentration. Vines are worked entirely by hand under lutte raisonnée with no insecticides or chemical fertilisers, and yields are held to approximately 25 hl/ha — well below appellation norms. In the cellar, grapes are 100% destemmed (with occasional whole-cluster inclusion up to ~30%), cold-soaked with native yeasts only, and fermented with the rarest of gentle punch-downs — what Cheurlin calls an 'infusion' rather than extraction philosophy. Aging runs 14–20 months in French oak; the wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered. The defining technical transgression: since approximately 2017, Cheurlin actively cools the cellar to delay and slow malolactic fermentation, a move Allen Meadows credits with adding measurable precision and complexity. The 2022 vintage shows fine intensity and structural refinement; drink from 2026 through the mid-2030s.