Château de Vaux "Les Hautes-Bassières" 2022 Pinot Noir Moselle

750ml bottle

13.5% abv

Light ruby ​​color. The nose shows tart morello cherry, red flowers, and earth. The palate follows, with lovely texture, lightness, and length.

Manually harvested. The grapes are put in vats after destemming, then macerate for three weeks with daily punch downs. After the long vatting, the press juice is drawn and the must is pressed. Free-run juice and press juice are blended. The wines are aged 100% in barrels of different origins, different ages, and different toasts. The aim is complexity but in no case strong aromatization. Twelve months barrel aging. Blending and bottling at the Château took place at the end of September.

Organic agriculture certified by Ecocert FR-BIO-01 and Biodynamic Agriculture certified by Demeter.

Château de Vaux is an estate created from scratch in 1999 by the "flying winemaker", Norbert Molozay and his wife, Marie-Geneviève, whose background is in science. In spring 2021, it relocated from its initial site in Vaux to the Villa Chazelles (in the town of Scy-Chazelles about ten kilometres from Metz) very close to the house once occupied by Robert Schuman, the so-called "Father of Europe".

This building's fascinating history is a perfect illustration of the region's turbulent recent past. The word "villa" belies its origins as a military wine cellar built in the late nineteenth century, when Lorraine was in German hands. Wine was brought here in tanks by rail and decanted into 8,900 hectolitres of available vats and tuns before being repackaged and dispatched throughout the region. Post-1918, the French army took over this infrastructure and for a while used it for the same purpose. Military wine warehouses subsequently became obsolete and the premises were used to store archaeological archives for the French Ministry of Culture from the 1980s.

With the estate expanding and the cellars of the Château de Vaux proving too small, the Molozays bought the former military wine cellars in 2019. After several months of renovations, the building reconnected with its past! Nowadays, the winepress is on the ground floor, while the wines mature in six cellars below ground level. The tasting areas's art deco interior contrasts sharply with the austere military architecture of the wine cellars and celebrates the era in which they were built.