Winemaker Notes
Attractive floral aromas with a hint of honeysuckle, green apple, toast, and mandarin oranges. Extremely well-balanced structure with a crystal clear juicy acidity, layered with minerality. A truly powerful and complex wine.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The appetizing nose on this wine offers creamy, nutty and lemon-scented freshness. The palate adds supersmooth, juicy ripeness that suggests yellow apple, juicy Mirabelle and a touch of honey from the ripeness of 2018. There is wonderful freshness, however, and cool, chalky depth that turns this into a balanced, rounded, mouthwatering wine with real dimension. The finish is zesty and long. Drink 2022–2040.
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James Suckling
A southeast parcel that has such effortless, smooth build and impressive length of peaches and mangoes with apricots and a robust, flowing finish. Drink or hold.
Barrel Sample: 92-93 -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Chablis Grand Cru Valmur is showing well, offering up a reserved bouquet of orchard fruit and oyster shell, framed by a delicate touch of toasty oak. On the palate, it's full-bodied, deep and layered, with excellent concentration and a long, stony finish.
Barrel Sample: 91-93 -
Wine Spectator
Opulent and creamy, featuring peach, honey, apple pie and lemon flavors, backed by lively acidity. This unfolds to a lingering spicy finish. Drink now through 2025.
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.