Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Chablis Grand Cru Vaudésir has a well-defined and quite complex bouquet, with scents of yellow plum, jasmine, flint and a touch of spice. The palate is well defined with a viscous opening, quite tropical in style but redeemed by a lovely thread of acidity and compelling purity on the finish. This is far superior to many Vaudésir that I tasted, demonstrating persistency and class from start to finish. Congratulations to Frédéric Barnier and his team! This is really rather excellent.
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James Suckling
Neat, powerful and slightly pithy. Green mangoes and peaches with a gentle, chalky edge, which holds the white peaches fresh and smooth. Good buy.
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Decanter
Lightly smoky on the nose, although no new oak has been used. Rich, broad and fleshy, this is weighty even for grand cru Chablis. It has some spice and vigour with quite a long finish.
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.