Winemaker Notes
Complex nose, with caramelised baked apple aromas, toasted notes and sensations of wet stone and undergrowth. The palate is vibrant, with a mouthwatering finish.
Serve between 53-57°F, it must be aired or decanted before tasting.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This has peach and some very fresh, sweet lemon aromas here. The palate is round and concentrated with some attractive, gentle grip. This has great shape and depth and is already looking very approachable. Drink over the next five years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Chablis 1er Cru Butteaux is showing very well, offering up lovely aromas of waxy lemon rind, beeswax, ripe apples and oyster shell. On the palate, the wine is medium to full-bodied, deep and nicely concentrated, with chewy dry extract, ripe acids and a long, nicely defined finish. This is one 2017 that nods to the 2015 vintage in structure and scale, but it's nicely balanced and will reward some bottle age.
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.