Winemaker Notes
2009 is a vintage to remember with a generous amount of sunny days throughout the vegetative cycle and the ripening season which paved the way for an early harvest in September. The contrast of sunny days and cool nights resulted in ripe grapes with good freshness and an excellent aromatic synthesis. 2009 is a fruity, complex, balanced and harmonious vintage to be enjoyed now or cellared for a decade.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Intensely perfumed, this supremely ripe wine has kept all the dense structure of the Les Clos vineyard. Here is an impressive mix of tight structure, ripe pear and citrus, layered with toast and great juicy acidity. Cellar Selection.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
I find less to get excited about in the 2009 Chablis Les Clos. Like the Blanchots, the Clos is a wine built mostly on fruit rather than structure or minerality. The 40% French oak is very nicely integrated, but the refinement and silkiness typical of the best wines from this site remain elusive.
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.