Domaine Laroche Chablis Les Blanchots Grand Cru 2015
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Decanter
Les Clos is often considered the finest of all the grands crus, but at Laroche Blanchots is often its equal. The firm owns 4.6ha of this site, with its limestone and white clay soils. The nose is rich and smoky, not very expressive now but there's underlying power. It's rich, broad, and fleshy, with concentration and spice. It shows tension on the mid-palate, which is citric and tangy, with white peach flavours too, and a saline mineral finish that's elegant and long.
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Wine & Spirits
This wine handles its ripeness with grace, touching on apple-like sweetness, rich notes of caramel and smoky scents of lees. It’s as generous as you would expect a grand cru Chablis to be, and its clean flavors have staying power. Built to cellar, this is a wine to serve at ten years of age with lobster and drawn butter.
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Wine Spectator
A strong minerally element runs through this rich white. Honey, pastry and baking spice notes surround the peach and melon flavors. Offers a fine, juicy finish. Drink now through 2021. 63 cases imported.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Chablis Grand Cru les Blanchots has an impressive, quite vivacious and flattering bouquet of ripe clementines and quince, a hint of blackcurrant leaf and an undertow of mineralité. The palate is well balanced with a fine bead of acidity, waxy in texture with almond and white peach toward the finish that does not quite deliver the precision of the Bouguerots. Give this two or three years in bottle.
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The history of Laroche dates to 1850, when Jean Victor Laroche purchased his first parcel of land in Chablis. Since then, Domaine Laroche has led movements to raise the quality of the appellation with the creation of a charter of excellence for the Grand Cru producers. One of the most respected and largest landholders of premier and grand cru vineyards, the winery owns 90 hectares situated among the best crus. Its headquarters, the Obédiencerie of Chablis, reveals a heritage dating back to the Middle Ages when the Canons of St. Martin of Tours were making wine. St. Martin’s relics were hidden in the Obédiencerie for a decade. Domaine Laroche still produces and ages its premiers and grands crus in these historical cellars. Under the direction of Gregory Viennois, the winemaking team designate one team member to each plot who is wholly responsible for the management of that vineyard from pruning and health of the soil to the quality and quantity of fruit yields. It is this philosophy that makes the expression of each Domaine Laroche wine individual and unparalleled in quality and style. The importance of the ecological balance is crucial to maintain the vineyard heritage and to favor its durability. The respect of the soil, the vine workers and the environment are the center Domaine Laroche’s philosophy.
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.