Winemaker Notes
Light yellow with a golden core. The nose is rich yet delicate and dominated by mineral, creamy, floral, honeyed notes and dried fruits. The attack is precise followed by a powerful and distinctive mid-palate that reveals its clay-limestone terroir. Citrus notes blend with mineral and iodised flavors in this remarkable wine from an exceptional terroir.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Lemon, lemon flower and white summer blossom are like a gentle caress on this wine's nose. The palate has the same buffered gentleness and soft aroma, with a concentrated midpalate that reveals texture and riper, juicier stone fruit. A smooth finish offers long, lemon freshness. Drink by 2035.
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Decanter
The Faiveley family's 0.4ha parcel of Les Preuses was planted in 1949 and is among the domaine's older blocks. Pale, fresh and refined, this was mostly stainless steel fermented, with just 10% seeing wood. Aniseed and lemon peel aromas lead you into a palate that combines stone fruit and lime flavours with a dusting of baking spices.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Chablis Grand Cru Les Preuses opens in the glass with aromas of fresh peach, citrus oil and oyster shell. Medium to full-bodied, round and charming, with ripe acids and a fleshy core of fruit, it's open-knit and elegant.
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.