Winemaker Notes
Bright and clear with delicate green reflections. This highly aromatic 1er Cru offers ripe citrus fruits and white flowers. The palate is well-rounded with remarkably persistent aromas.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Sustainably grown from vines 50-years-plus in age, this wine is reductive, with good tension. It is medium-bodied yet powerful and vibrant with a palate loaded with fresh pears and apple flesh, white mushroom and chalk, with a warm toasty finish from roughly 14 months of barrel aging. While enjoyable in its youth, cellaring for another three to five years is recommended.
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Jasper Morris
4 plots on the Chablis side, but all the way up the slope. Olivier notes that yields are always low from what he describes as ‘tired old, soil’. This is a clean and powerful version that has kept to classic lines without undue exoticism, but the wood adds a little toast to the finish. 14% alcohol, but with low pH and, so fresh acidity saves the day.
Barrel Sample: 89-92 -
Wine Spectator
A clean, lemon-flavored white, with notes of green apple and a hint of vanilla. Balanced and smooth, with refreshing acidity on the lingering finish. Drink now through 2024. 1,250 cases made, 150 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.