The Nowack family has been in the village of Vandières, in the Marne Valley, since 1795. Flavien Nowack returned home in 2011 after studies in Avize and a formative stint in Meursault at Coche-Dury, and has spent the years since pulling the family domaine, slowly and methodically, into a new orbit: organic and biodynamic farming, indigenous yeasts, no chaptalization, tirage under cork, and long aging on the lees before disgorgement. He works roughly nine hectares (roughly three-quarters meunier, with chardonnay and pinot noir filling out the rest) and produces around 30,000 bottles a year. His farming reaches well past organic certification: agroforestry, more than a hundred trees planted among the vines, and a parcel-by-parcel approach to the estate itself — each plot converted to organic farming on its own schedule, vinified separately, and bottled as a single-site, single-vintage wine. The Vandières terroir has historically lived in the shadow of the more storied villages further east, and Flavien's project is, in essence, the long treatise that it shouldn't.

La Tuilerie is a 1.20-hectare parcel of chardonnay just below the Nowack cellar in Vandières, mid-slope, facing south-southwest. The topsoil is thin and full of pierre meulière — the gritstone that, in Flavien's words, gives the wine its menthol and pepper edge — over a deep vein of white, calcareous sand and a foundation of marl. The "L.V." (Long Vieillissement) bottling is a rare late release of the vintage Tuilerie, given more than ten years on the lees in bottle before disgorgement. Fermentation in a combination of small barrel and stainless, aged in barrel as vin clair, never fined or filtered, with malolactic completing naturally in the spring. Disgorged at 1 g/L. The 2012 is exactly the case for what extended lees aging does to a serious chardonnay: ripe citrus, white peach, acacia, toasted almond, and a chalky tension that drives the finish for what feels like a full minute. A wine of remarkable depth and a long horizon ahead.