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.

Terres Bleues sits at the very top of Flavien's best slope in Vandières, planted at 180 meters on sand and a fossil-rich limestone the locals call terres bleues — the seam of bluish marl that gives the wine its name. It's the highest-elevation meunier in the lineup, and the most filigreed. The base wine is unfined and unfiltered, aged in small oak. The 2020 has the lift and tension that altitude gives: ripe apple, citrus zest, wet stone, and a saline, mineral pulse that lingers well past the fruit.