Winemaker Notes
This powerful and complex wine captures the remarkable stony and sunny soils of its vineyards. It flourishes with age, expressing mineral aromas reminiscent of gunflint. The wine is full and flavorsome with a firm backbone of acidity. The Côte de Lechet is one of the Premiers Crus of the Chablisian vineyard with the most exceptional aging potential. This beautiful wine will enhance any dish, and it pairs particularly well with fish dishes, even in rich sauces, poultry, and risotto.
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
The 2023 Chablis Côte de Léchet 1er Cru has a clean, precise, very focused nose with a seductive marine aroma. The palate is very well balanced with a fine bead of acidity. It's slightly reductive in style, with good weight and a powerful finish. Give this a couple of years just to shake off that reduction because I like its nascent energy. Tasted blind at the BIVB offices in Chablis.
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.