Winemaker Notes
Bright and clear with a pale yellow hue and greenish glimmers. The complex nose reveals a delicate bouquet of white flowers, lime blossom, acacia, vanilla and honey. The palate is well-structured and perfectly balanced between smoothness and acidity.
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
From three plots, vinified in tank and then racked into wood. Olivier found it a bit austere, so wanted to fatten it out and add complexity. Iodine notes starting to be teased out on the nose. This is an excellent expression of the vineyard bolstered by the ripeness of the vintage, but still entirely within limits. Very long pure white fruit aftertaste.
Barrel Sample: 92-95 -
Wine Enthusiast
Grown from approximately 12 acres, this wine is flashy and crisp. The palate offers a beautiful balance between white flowers, acacia, citrus pith and fresh almond.
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.