Winemaker Notes
Mineral and taut, dense and rich, the Les Perrieres is a multifaceted Chardonnay that keeps you coming back to the glass. With medium body and impressive depth, this wine shows notes of lemon curd, cream pie, and white flowers along hints of wet stone and incisive minerality.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Mâcon-Cruzille Les Perrières is showing nicely, delivering aromas of pear, tangerine oil, buttery pastry and iodine, followed by a medium to full-bodied, satiny and suave palate with a flossy attack and a bright, tangy but charming mid-palate.
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Jasper Morris
Planted in 1978, on oolitic limestone high on the slope. Perrières survived the frost better in 2021 than Combettes and Genievrières. Fresh lemon yellow. Very perfumed, more floral than the Pouilly-Fuissé, a fresher style of fruit. Beautiful on the palate, clean and prominent white fruit with the saline finish of the vintage. Really very good. Les Perrières is consistent across the vintages says Emmanuel.
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.
These are the fun, fruit-driven and lively Chardonnays of white Burgundy, often offering some fantastic values and options that you don’t have to cellar. Flavors range from fresh green apple and lemon to melon or pineapple; some of the best are fleshy and mineral driven or balanced by a light touch of oak.
Mâconnais Chardonnay may have the weight of their more serious Côte de Beaune sisters, but not quite the refinement. Still, this appellation is one of the best ways to jump from California Chardonnay to something new and begin to understand white Burgundy.
The Mâconnais region is warmer and drier than the rest of Burgundy to its north (Côte d’Or) and has a landscape of rolling hills and farmland interspersed among vineyards. The region produces a lot of Chardonnay—Viré-Clessé and Pouilly-Fuisse are among the best—and a very small amount of red wine from Gamay and Pinot Noir. The soils of Mâconnais remain limestone dominant like in the Côte d’Or, making it a wonderful spot for Chardonnay to thrive. Gamay's home of Beaujolais lies just to the south.