Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
Clear bright pale lemon. Plenty of character on the nose, the fruit has come fully forward. This is excellent! Exactly what I want from left bank Chablis and though still youthful, it is fully open for business, indeed fleshes out very well at the back of the palate without losing its kimmeridgian crunch.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: As one of Chablis' most known premier crus, Vaillon has proven the most reliable as well as one that is easily found in the marketplace. The 2017 Domaine Christian Moreau Père et Fils Vaillon is an excellent wine. TASTING NOTES: This wine offers layers of textures and a beautiful and crisp finish. Its aromas and flavors of green apple, dried herbs, and striking minerality should make it a superb wine with tobiko, ikura, and other briny sashimis. (Tasted: February 12, 2019, San Francisco, CA)
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James Suckling
There’s very attractive plushness here with expressive mangoes, apricots and peaches on the nose that chisel into the finish in linear, long and firm shape. Drink now.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Chablis 1er Cru Vaillon is showing well, unwinding in the glass with a pretty bouquet of fresh peach, citrus blossom, blanched almonds, smoke and fresh pastry. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, satiny and elegant, displaying promising tension and youthful reserve, concluding with a pure and precise 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.
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.