Maxime Cheurlin Noellat Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru Les Noirots

From 1990 to 2010, every bottle this domaine could have made was sold in bulk to Jadot and Drouhin — meaning Maxime Cheurlin, grandson of Marie-Thérèse Noëllat and a blood relative of the Jayer family, built the entire estate reputation from his very first vintage at age twenty. Les Noirots sits on the northern flank of Chambolle-Musigny, where the classic Côte de Nuits argilo-calcaire (clay-limestone) subsoil delivers the appellation's signature aromatic lift from the limestone fraction while the clay underpins concentration — a combination that rewards Cheurlin's low-intervention approach far more than a heavier extraction style would. In the cellar, grapes are 100% destemmed, cold-soaked for several days, then fermented exclusively with indigenous yeasts using rare, gentle punch-downs — what Cheurlin calls infusion rather than extraction. Aging runs 14–20 months in French oak; the cellar is actively cooled to deliberately delay and slow malolactic fermentation, a technique adopted from around 2017 that Allen Meadows has credited with adding precision and complexity. The wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered. The MLF-delay protocol is the technical transgression here: almost no Côte de Nuits producer applies it systematically across the range. The 2022 vintage shows fine intensity and refinement, continuing the domaine's run of strong recent releases.