Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Impressive depth. The nose delivers an array of exotic fruits such as mangoes, pawpaw and nectarines. On the palate, it is all about the bracing acidity and pure stony minerals, underpinning vibrant powerful fruit. A long finish. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Chablis Grand Cru Les Preuses was vinified entirely in stainless steel this year. The wine offers up aromas of honeyed peaches and flowers, followed by a medium to full-bodied, tensile, tangy palate, with a reserved profile and a stony, saline finish. It's deeper and more concentrated than the Vaudésir. This isn't a historic rendition of this bottling, but it's a fine effort in a challenging vintage.
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Wine Spectator
A lively version, offering a juicy combination of apple, lemon and mineral notes, with the acidity keeping this well-defined and long. Not built for the long haul, but shows verve for the vintage. Drink now through 2024. 35 cases imported.
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.