Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This vineyard is regarded as the finest of the Grand Crus, certainly for its more serious character. This 2014 has great complexity, toast and spice mingling with the mineral and white-fruit flavors. It is obviously set for long-term aging with its wood still not fully integrated. Drink this impressive wine from 2020.Cellar Selection
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Bottled in February 2016, the 2014 Chablis Grand Cru les Clos has a refined bouquet that as I mentioned last year, you could easily mistake for a Chardonnay from the Côte de Beaune. It is clean and precise, just a touch of flint giving away its Chablis origin. The palate is very well balanced with squeezed lime and citrus fruit on the entry, hints of dried orange peel, fine balance with a touch of spice lending it an almost Les Preuses-like personality on the finish. Enjoy this Les Clos over the next 8-10 years.
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.