Domaine Georges Noellat Beaune 1er Cru "Clos de la Mignotte"

When Maxime Cheurlin took his first harvest in 2010 at age twenty, the entire domaine's fruit had been sold in bulk to Jadot and Drouhin for two decades — meaning every bottle of Noëllat on the market today is the work of a single young winemaker building a reputation from scratch, with old-vine parcels and a cellar next door to Sylvain Cathiard as his inheritance. The Beaune Clos de la Mignotte sits on the classic argilo-calcaire of the Côte, where the limestone fraction drives drainage and aromatic precision while clay beneath contributes structural density — a combination that rewards Cheurlin's deliberately light touch. Grapes are hand-harvested, meticulously sorted, and 100% destemmed before a cold pre-fermentation maceration of several days; fermentation proceeds exclusively on indigenous yeasts with punch-downs kept rare and gentle — what Cheurlin calls infusion rather than extraction. French oak aging runs 14–20 months, with new-oak proportion calibrated to appellation level; the wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered. The defining technical transgression: the cellar is actively cooled to delay and slow malolactic fermentation, a practice adopted from around 2017 that critics including Allen Meadows credit with adding precision and complexity uncommon at Premier Cru level. The 2022 vintage shows fine intensity and refinement, continuing a run of strong releases from this address.