Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A more mineral style from a plot at the top of the cru. This is later ripening and it retains the acidity. This has long, smooth and majestic style with a wealth of peaches. Very smooth and ripe with a grilled-hazelnut finish. Good freshness for the vintage. Pastry-like and succulent at the finish, too. Superior length. Drink or hold.
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Decanter
The Butteaux is excellent in 2016, offering up a classic nose of apple, spring flowers, beeswax and chalky soil tones, framed by a light reduction. On the palate the wine is cool, glossy and textural. It's full-bodied, broader than the tensile Montée de Tonnerre, its minerality married with a succulent core of fruit.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Raveneau's 2016 Chablis 1er Cru Butteaux is excellent, offering up a youthfully reserved bouquet of apple, white peach, beeswax and dried flowers. On the palate, it's medium to full-bodied, with lovely texture, considerable mid-palate amplitude and a bright line of acidity, concluding with a firm, salty finish that balances its somewhat gourmand attack. Along with the Vaillons, the Butteaux stood out as one of the most complete of Raveneau's premiers crus this year, revealing more and more nuance over several days. Right now, it's quite closed, but I won't be surprised if it becomes quite musky and exotic after a few years in the cellar.
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.