Winemaker Notes
Clear, bright hue with light green tinges. This Premier Cru reveals a remarkably rich aromatic profile with ripe citrus fruits and white flowers. The palate is rich and round with exceptional length.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
There is an excellent balance between rich, honeyed notes and very crisp, clean acidity. Stony edge to the finish. This is approachable now but really needs several years. From four parcels, part of the blend is matured in barrel, the rest in tank.
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Wine Spectator
This white is rich, sporting peach, melon and light baking spice flavors, plus a deft touch of oak for roundness. Shows concentration throughout, with fine harmony and length.
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Jasper Morris
Pale lemon yellow. A richer white fruit and some oak on the nose. This has really tightened up on the palate, good dry extract, some fresh acidity, and a spicy note as well. The 2022 Mont de Milieu has temporarily gone slightly into its shell.
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.