Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Les Fourneaux has always been a warmer site in Chablis and this expression of a doubly hot, dry vintage stuns with tropical notes of ripe pineapple, mango and yellow peach. Full bodied and etched by a smoky, spicy countenance, it's a fleshy yet nuanced white that should continue to improve through 2029 and hold further.
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Jasper Morris
My tasting of this wine was interrupted by a lengthy disquisition on the relative merits of 41B and 161/49C rootstocks. The vines are 70 years old and the wine was vinified and aged with 20% wood and bottled in July. This is beautifully balanced, no more forceful than the regular at the start, but with a fuller mid palate and more interesting aromatics, which he ascribes to 161/49C. Excellent finish.
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.