Winemaker Notes
This is powerful, complex, but also refined and understated. Crisp, vibrant acidity, subtle wood notes and a long, lingering, mineral finish.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Touch of smoky oak on the nose. Crisp, fleshy and vibrant palate with the necessary acidity to keep the palate fresh. Can be broached quite young. Has concentration to age four to six years.
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Wine Enthusiast
Ripe red apple skin, wildflowers and pulverized stone create a round aromatic nose. The palate is fleshy, showcasing fine stony minerality that leads to a saline finish. Great mouthwatering acidity refreshes the palate, enticing you for the next big sip. This wine is a delightful experience from start to finish.
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Wine Spectator
There's a firm edge that perhaps exaggerates this white's austere character and mutes its lemon oil, apple and green plum aromas and flavors -- at least for now. A stony, mineral element nails down the finish. Give this time. Drink now through 2030. 142 cases made.
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.