“As you’ve probably noticed, the Nøvice project is based on sincerity, hard work, respect, teamwork, and honesty.”
That was the beginning of one of the more moving DMs I’ve ever received. It was from the Jura vigneron Yves Roy of Nøvice. I received it late at night in a flat in Arbois, a few days after my visit to him in his home village of Poligny.
And yes, I had noticed. How could I not?
But I admit, I hadn’t the first time I met Yves in the spring of 2024. There he was pouring his really, okay, I’ll use the word, fun, hybrid wines on tap in the midst right next to where Deirdre Heekin and I were in the jam-packed Salon des Cépages Résistants. A joyous tasting if there ever was one.
What I did see was that he was a magnet for people, that his wines were snappy and yet straightforward. But I had no sense of his real wines or of his place. This past June, however, when three people told me not to miss him and Nøvice, I took the hint.
Yves is a gentle-looking man with vivid blue eyes. His graying beard clutches his chin and jaw. The beanie I’d last seen him wearing had been replaced by a baseball cap. He started the project at age fifty, in 2019, and is now certainly at the time of life when most people stop planting new vines. That, of course, is the irony of the name: Nøvice.
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