Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Aux Boudots"

From 1990 to 2010, every grape grown at Domaine Georges Noëllat was sold in bulk to Jadot and Drouhin — meaning the entire reputation now attached to this address was constructed by Maxime Cheurlin, then 20 years old, starting from a single harvest. That biographical fact is inseparable from the technical ambition on display here.

Aux Boudots sits at the northern tip of Nuits-Saint-Georges, where the appellation boundary meets Vosne-Romanée, on classic Côte de Nuits argilo-calcaire soils — clay providing concentration and textural weight, limestone delivering drainage and aromatic precision. The proximity to Vosne lends the climat a translucency unusual for Nuits.

Cheurlin's winemaking is built around restraint: 100% destemmed fruit, cold pre-fermentation maceration, native yeasts only, and punch-downs that are rare and deliberately gentle — what he calls 'infusion' rather than extraction. Aging runs 14–20 months in French oak, with new-oak proportion calibrated by appellation.

Crucially, the cellar is actively cooled to delay and slow malolactic fermentation, a technique adopted from around 2017 that critics including Allen Meadows credit with adding precision and structural complexity. Bottled unfined and unfiltered.

The 2021 vintage — frost-ravaged across the Côte — produced severely limited volumes but wines of focused, precise fruit that amplify the domaine's characteristic lacy texture rather than compensating with weight. A Cheurlin-Noëllat lineage wine (he is a cousin of Emmanuel Rouget's sons) that drinks on the lighter side of Nuits but carries uncommon depth for its appellation level.