Winemaker Notes
Chablis achieves its highly distinctive mineral character due to its cool northerly climate and its highly calcareous soil. The Domaine Louis Moreau Chablis Les Clos Grand Cru displays a very mineral bouquet, with an elegant fineness and impressive length on the palate.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is young, surprisingly fruity at this stage for this normally textured, structured Grand Cru. A pure line of sliced apple and green-plum flavors are shot through with tangy acidity. The fruitiness and intense acidity will pass soon and the wine will develop the proper steely, tight and mineral character. It will drink at its best from 2020.
Cellar Selection
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 Chablis Grand Cru les Clos sees 24 months in stainless steel, of which half is on the fine lees. It has a lifted, yellow flower and walnut-scented, rather smoky bouquet that is harmonious and detailed. It actually gains intensity in the glass with just a few swirls. The palate is well balanced with a strong saline component, but then it clams up towards the structured finish as if to say, come back in 2-3 years, which you should. This is one to watch.
Rating: 91+
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.