Winemaker Notes
Color green gold, almond and fresh butter nose, stops full and flexible.
Serve with roasted lobster.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Subtle hints of reduction, wet chalk and yeasty funk play on this wine's nose, promising depth and longevity. The palate reinforces these elements, adding a touch of lemon fresheness. This wine is about about stone and site—fruit barely gets a look-in, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a wine for the long run. Best After 2022
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Decanter
Another fine Vaillons from the Dampt clan, this has a fine texture, richness and a mouth-coating feel, with plenty of acidity to finish. Slightly sour fruits on the aftertaste add a savoury feel to the wine. Vaillons may be characterised as perfumed and of a sunny disposition, yet this is a serious rendition with a good future ahead.
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.