Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Certainly in the same league as the 2013, yet with a more understated, elegant style, the 2014 Chablis 1er Cru Butteaux offers a complex bouquet of white flowers, stone fruits, lemon curd, toasted nuts, and subtle yet building, flinty minerality. While this beauty starts out tight and ungiving, it blossoms with time in the glass and has a seamlessness, as well as purity, that’s world-class. Playing in the medium-bodied end of the spectrum, with bright yet integrated acidity, it needs decanting if drinking in the next couple of years, and I suspect is best with a good 4-5 years of bottle age.
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Jasper Morris
Mid yellow to pale gold. A delicious complex, lightly sulphured nose, thinking about wet wool. This is a real smell and watch develop experience. A faint waxiness, on the nose the wine appears to be approaching maturity. Huge intensity at the back, with both acidity and almost a tannic feel. Very good detail.
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.