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.

Les Bauchets is the only single-vineyard pinot noir in the lineup, from a parcel planted in 1980 on pure white marne soils that surface right at ground level. The base wine is unfined and unfiltered, aged in small oak. The 2019 carries Bauchets's signature combination of breadth and energy — red berry, pink florals, woodsmoke, and a saline, chalky finish that anchors the fruit.