Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2009 Chablis Vaillons is a round, textured wine that impresses for its harmony and sense of proportion. Sweet, open aromatics meld into a generous core of yellow stone fruits. Hints of smoke and crushed rocks add further nuance on the pliant mid-palate and finish. This is quite suave and elegant throughout. It should drink well right out of the gate. Approximately 35% of the wine was aged in oak.
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Wine Enthusiast
Ripe and rich, a wine that shows orange, pear and lime zest flavors alongside toast and herbs. It has a pure line of acidity and minerality that cuts through the warm fruit and gives extra shape to the wine.
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Wine Spectator
This shows concentration of peach and melon flavors and a creamy, almost viscous texture. The acidity and stony undercurrent keep this fresh and balanced. Lingers with mineral and anise accents.
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.