Winemaker Notes
Pink grapefruit on the nose. Complex progression the palate, starting with mid-palate flavors of herb, wet stones, and lime with minerality and a dry finish.
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
Bottled November. Clear mid lemon. The nose is stricter than the 2023, more a classic Vaillons, with mineral purity, white fruit, plenty of flesh but nicely balanced by the lees work. Very long finish here, an exceptionally fine Vaillons. The aftertaste just keeps on delivering.
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Vinous
The 2022 Chablis Vaillons Vieilles Vignes 1er Cru has developed wonderfully on the nose: orchard fruit, hints of brioche and lanolin. More complex than the 2023 out of barrel. The palate is very well balanced with fine acidity, becoming stricter toward the sapid and focused finish. I'd cellar this for two or three years.
Rating: 92+ -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Chablis 1er Cru Vaillons Vieilles Vignes delivers a generous bouquet of sweet stone fruits, white flowers and wet stones, followed by a medium to full-bodied, satiny and saline palate that's more classically tightly wound than the nose would suggest; but this is one instance where the 2021 rendition is more typically Chablisien than its 2022 counterpart.
One of the most popular and versatile white wine grapes, Chardonnay offers a wide range of flavors and styles depending on where it is grown and how it is made. While it tends to flourish in most environments, Chardonnay from its Burgundian homeland produces some of the most remarkable and longest lived examples. California produces both oaky, buttery styles and leaner, European-inspired wines. Somm Secret—The Burgundian subregion of Chablis, while typically using older oak barrels, produces a bright style similar to the unoaked style. Anyone who doesn't like oaky Chardonnay would likely enjoy Chablis.
The source of the most racy, light and tactile, yet uniquely complex Chardonnay, Chablis, while considered part of Burgundy, actually reaches far past the most northern stretch of the Côte d’Or proper. Its vineyards cover hillsides surrounding the small village of Chablis about 100 miles north of Dijon, making it actually closer to Champagne than to Burgundy. Champagne and Chablis have a unique soil type in common called Kimmeridgian, which isn’t found anywhere else in the world except southern England. A 180 million year-old geologic formation of decomposed clay and limestone, containing tiny fossilized oyster shells, spans from the Dorset village of Kimmeridge in southern England all the way down through Champagne, and to the soils of Chablis. This soil type produces wines full of structure, austerity, minerality, salinity and finesse.
Chablis Grands Crus vineyards are all located at ideal elevations and exposition on the acclaimed Kimmeridgian soil, an ancient clay-limestone soil that lends intensity and finesse to its wines. The vineyards outside of Grands Crus are Premiers Crus, and outlying from those is Petit Chablis. Chablis Grand Cru, as well as most Premier Cru Chablis, can age for many years.