Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
0.75ha in area, with average age of 40 years, Raveneau's Valmur is already highly appealing with a luscious, ripe and concentrated stone fruit character. Yet this is not all heavy but has great lift and acidity to give the wine wonderful freshness on the finish. A fine balance of ripe fruit and precision. A very fine example of Valmur Grand Cru which will age beautifully for many years.
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Vinous
The 2021 Chablis Valmur Grand Cru was picked on September 23. This has a complex bouquet of praline, yellow fruit and touches of white linen emerging with time. The palate is well-balanced with fine delineation, taut and fresh, perhaps even more saline with a crescendo towards the classically styled, shadowy glade finish. This outstanding Valmur will age beautifully over the next 25- to 30-years.
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.