Winemaker Notes
Generous nose with floral notes and ripe white fruit, there is richness and texture on the palate with an underlying salinity.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Bottled with a highest ever alcohol level of 14.3%, but such is Jean-Claude Bessin's skill as a winemaker that the resulting wine doesn't seem remotely heavy or ponderous. Showing some skin tannins, notes of pink grapefruit and classic old vine concentration, this is comparatively soft but has enough extract for balance.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Bessin's 2018 Chablis Vieilles Vignes exhibits aromas of citrus oil, peach, fresh bread and blanched almonds. Medium to full-bodied, elegantly fleshy and enveloping, with succulent acids and a nicely defined finish, it's a fine result in this abundant and sometimes concomitantly diffuse vintage.
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.