Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2020 Chanson Pere & Fils Chassagne-Montrachet Premier Cru Les Chenevottes is elegant, persistent, and impressive. TASTING NOTES: This wine excels with aromas and flavors of dried mushrooms, earth, and tangy green apples. Serve it with freshly steamed Dungeness crab in a savory cream sauce. (Tasted: February 16, 2022, San Francisco, CA)
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Jasper Morris
Deeper clay soil here. Clear crisp lemon colour. Quite a stylish nose, 13.3%, so the balance should be there. More precision and certainly the concentration. This grows impressively across the palate, to a fine well-balanced finish. There is certainly plenty of volume here and all the component parts are nicely harnessed.
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James Suckling
Expansive nose of ripe apricot with hints of papaya and vanilla. Rich, but well structured and lively. Ample leesy creaminess on the mid-palate, then the chalky minerality comes through to drive the long finish.
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.
A Côte de Beaune village of Burgundy most famous for its beautifully textured and powerful whites, Chassagne-Montrachet reaches farthest south in the Côte d’Or, save for the village of Santenay. It has three Grands Crus vineyards: Le Montrachet, Bâtard-Montrachet and Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet. Le Montrachet and Bâtard-Montrachet overlap with and are (confusingly) shared with the village of Puligny-Montrachet. But Chassagne-Montrachet bears sole ownership of the Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet Grand Cru.
The beauty doesn’t stop there as the village has a great many outstanding Premiers Crus wines and village level wines. Most famous Premiers Crus vineyards include Les Chenevottes, Clos de la Maltroie, En Cailleret and Les Ruchottes. Also, village level wines offer many lovely examples of what Chassagne-Montrachet has to offer, but at more approachable price points and perhaps less demand of waiting.
The best sites in Chassagne-Montrachet have complex soils of sedimentary rock and limestone (with less marl). Whites, which are by law composed of 100% Chardonnay (as in all classified white Burgundy from Côte d’Or), have steely power, bright and concentrated citrus, stone or tropical fruit characteristics and attractive textures ranging from plush to tactile, grippy and mineral-driven.
There is some fine Pinot Noir produced from the village. These wines tend to be high-toned and earthy, with wild herb aromas and suave tannins.