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: biodynamic farming, indigenous yeasts, no chaptalization, and long aging on the lees under cork before disgorgement. He triggers the second fermentation with fresh grape must rather than liqueur, which drops the finished pressure and gives the wines a vinous, finely beaded character, and he believes they want five or more years after disgorgement to arrive where he imagines them.
Flavien works roughly nine hectares (about 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, with agroforestry and more than a hundred trees planted among the vines. The estate itself is worked parcel by parcel: each plot is converted 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, a long treatise that it shouldn't.
La Tuilerie is Nowack's only blanc de blancs and his sole chardonnay holding: a 1.20-hectare parcel just below the cellar, mid-slope, facing south-southwest at 100 to 120 meters, its vines averaging 25 years of age. The topsoil is thin and full of pierre meulière, the gritstone Flavien credits for the wine's savory, mineral edge, over a deep vein of white, calcareous sand and a foundation of marl. He calls 2019 a near-perfect vintage for chardonnay in this corner of the appellation, and one taste supports that claim.
The fruit ferments spontaneously in a combination of small barrel and stainless steel, and the vin clair is aged in barrel, never fined, filtered, or cold-stabilized, with malolactic completing naturally in spring. The dosage is barely detectable. It is opulent and precise at once: ripe lemon, white peach and quince, acacia and toasted hazelnut, a thread of menthol and white pepper, and a chalky tension that drives the finish for what feels like a full minute. Drink now through 2034.
