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 Fontinette is a one-hectare parcel of meunier in the neighboring village of Châtillon-sur-Marne, planted by Flavien's grandfather between 1965 and 1967 by sélection massale. The vines face south-southwest on roughly two meters of heavy brown clay over white marl — a soil profile that gives the wine its particular weight and slow, drawn-out finish. Vinification is in barrel, unfined and unfiltered. The 2020 is a meunier of remarkable depth: white flowers, ripe pear, smoked almond, and a chalky, savory pull through a long finish. The cuvée that started Flavien on the single-parcel path in 2012, and still arguably the most singular wine in his lineup.