Domaine Georges Noellat Vosne-Romanee 1er Cru "Les Petits Monts"

When Maxime Cheurlin took his first vintage in 2010 at age twenty, the entire domaine's production had been sold in bulk to Jadot and Drouhin for two decades — meaning every bottle of Noëllat carrying a domaine label is, effectively, a post-2010 creation built from scratch by a single young winemaker with pre-war vines and a Jayer bloodline. Les Petits Monts sits on the upper slope of Vosne-Romanée's premier cru band, where the argilo-calcaire soils thin toward the limestone bedrock; the elevated limestone fraction sharpens drainage and amplifies aromatic lift, while residual clay sustains mid-palate concentration even in lean years. The 2021 frost compressed yields further below the domaine's already austere ~25 hl/ha average, concentrating the fruit into a focused, precise expression. Cheurlin's winemaking is built around restraint: 100% destemmed, native-yeast fermentation, rare and gentle punch-downs that extract color and tannin by infusion rather than force, and French oak aging (14–20 months) at a new-oak proportion calibrated to premier cru level. His most transgressive technical choice — active cellar cooling to deliberately delay malolactic fermentation, adopted from around 2017 — preserves a structural precision that Allen Meadows has credited with elevating the domaine's wines beyond their appellation weight. Bottled unfined and unfiltered. The 2021 vintage delivers focused, precise fruit with characteristic Noëllat delicacy; limited volumes make this one of the harder cuvées to source. Drink from 2025 through 2034.