Winemaker Notes
Bright, clear hue with greenish reflections. The complex nose offers delicate aromas of fresh pear combined with toasty and smoky notes. The palate is well-structured with good freshness and a wonderful salinity. This wine’s distinctive minerality and lively character linger on the finish.
Pair with Burgundy snails, mussels, crayfish, veal or chops.
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
Pale lemon yellow. The bouquet is noticeably more developed than Fourchaumes in an engaging soft woolly style of white fruit. There is a noticeably greater intensity of fruit here, along with a more defined acidity and, I suspect, greater dry extract. Altogether a wine at a more powerful level. Still in reserve but excellent potential.
Barrel Sample: 93-95 -
James Suckling
It may be from one of the least well-known of the Chablis 1er Cru sites, but this is a beautiful wine that combines creamy elegance with chalky and licorice character. Complex mouth-feel at the long, chalky finish that has so much mineral energy.
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Decanter
Produced with purchased grapes. Nice touch of subtle spice here, hints of orange and lime zest, nice fresh acidity, but just lacking a little mid-palate weight.
Barrel Sample: 92
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.