Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This has impressive, tighter coiled power and intensity with a focused palate that delivers lime and white peaches in acid-driven style. Great wine that is tautly structured. Plenty of flavor as befits this Grand Cru.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Chablis Grand Cru Valmur has an attractive bouquet with scents of dried pineapple, quince and a touch of melted candle waxquite pithy in style. The palate is well balanced with a crisp entry and a fine line of acidity cutting through the lightly honeyed fruit, leading to an attractive, precise finish that lingers long in the mouth. Excellent.
Range: 92-24 -
Wine Enthusiast
Moreau owns three acres of this, the smallest, grand cru vineyard. Delicate toast flavors beautifully enhance the great fruitiness of the wine. Bright apple, apricot and quince flavors are laced with a tight texture, toast and final acidity. Leave this wine to mature and drink from 2021.
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.