Description
Geoffrey de Noüel, Chinon “Les Noraies”
The other day, looking over the offers we’ve sent out this year, I realized we’d somehow made it close to nine months without shining a single spotlight on Chinon. That’s a failure on our part, both because we—like most sommeliers we know—drink oodles of the stuff in our free time, and because few categories offer as much honest soul and unadorned complexity for such a modest price. Consider Geoffrey de Noüel’s “Les Noraies” our penance.
It’s an organically farmed, mind-bendingly delicious beauty packed with all the finesse, minerality, and perfume any Loire Cabernet Franc fanatic could ask for. Geoffrey de Noüel isn’t yet a household name, but he represents a new high water mark for artisanal, “natural” winemaking in the region. Offering vivacious, brambly fruit married to Cab Franc’s signature earthy spice, his “Les Noraies” is equal parts drink-me-now pleasure bomb and terroir-transparent touchstone. And pro tip: It’s something of a sommelier insider secret that the best Chinons, despite their humble price, will go a decade or more in the cellar. This certainly falls into that category, so load up!
Geoffrey is a winemaking wunderkind. He’s only 30 years old, and has only had his estate for five years, but farms and ferments with all the drive and precision of a lifer. Although he doesn’t come from a winemaking family, he’s known it would be his life’s work from a young age, when his grandmother passed her love of wine along to him. After attending winemaking school, he held a number of prestigious internships in Burgundy, where he learned from the best how to make hyper focused, plot-specific bottlings.
Geoffrey’s experience and passion, combined with his obvious talent, place him at the vanguard of natural winemaking. In the vineyard, he’s strictly organic—no herbicides, no insecticides—and he’s been certified from the beginning. All his wines ever see is a touch of sulfur, after fermenting spontaneously and aging at least 18 months. As Geoffrey says, “I’d rather have a wine with a small imperfection and a lot of charm than a wine with no defects, and no personality.” Don’t fret though; this is no flawed natural wine experiment gone wrong. It’s just impossibly pure and refreshing, singing with that brightness, fruit purity, and verve only the best hands-off winemakers can achieve.
“Les Noraies” comes from a single vineyard at Chinon’s far eastern edge, where the soils are a mixture of limestone and sandstone known locally as tuffeau jaune. We recommend a 15-minute decant here, after which it positively explodes. It pours a translucent purple with hints of ruby, and leaps out of the glass with a pitch-perfect mix of luscious blackberry, sweet red cherry, redcurrant, violets, tomato leaf, crushed green pepper, loamy wet earth, and cedary spice. The palate is vibrantly pure and almost lush, singing with darker, plummier fruits thanks to the warm 2018 vintage, the tannins mouth-coating yet polished. It’s a bottle that seamlessly straddles the line between refreshment and refinement, best served at a slightly cool cellar temp, and I have no doubt it’ll pull this trick off for many years to come. It’s great to be back in Chinon!
