Winemaker Notes
Elegant, pale golden color with greenish glimmers. The delicate nose offers mineral, honeyed notes combined with citrus and white stone fruits. The palate is powerful, dense and fleshy with a lively acidity. Mineral and saline notes linger on the finish.
Pair with filet of John Dory with chervil butter, spicy cod loin, or tiger prawns flambé.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
So cool and delicate, so deep and refined, this Chablis Grand Cru is only just beginning to open up and display its fabulous elegance. Very precise and filigree palate that doesn’t even reach the upper end of medium-bodied, because this kind of chardonnay doesn’t need volume to impress. Such an incredibly elegant finish that pulls you back for more.
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Decanter
Currently showing a bit more oak, this has plenty of weight on the palate. A little more heft than this producer’s Les Preuses, but likely to be more popular. Impressive but, for me, not their top 2020. Sappy on the palate, casks were used here for fermentation and malolactic.
Barrel Sample: 95 -
Jasper Morris
Made from purchased fruit. Mid lemon yellow, lightly grilled hazelnuts, pyrazines, some oak in this which may contribute. The wine behind has plenty of energy but doesn’t compete with Preuses for overall excellence. Still, fine long and ripe with a smoky bacon finish.
Barrel Sample: 92-95
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.