Winemaker Notes
This year the Séchets has been bottled separately from the Vaillons, although many years ago it was bottled on its own – at the Restaurant Hostelerie les Clos there was a magnum bottle of the 1937 on display. A very refined, classy nose which is very floral, almost like rose water. It has lemon candied fruit and a good balance of power and acidity. Refined, super angular, pure and refreshing with a powdered, sugar cane finish.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Chablis 1er Cru Séchets is lovely, mingling aromas of citrus oil, white flowers, iodine and oyster shell in an incipiently complex bouquet, followed by a medium to full-bodied, satiny and incisive palate that's racy, saline and penetrating. Bottled under Diam, it will age with grace.
-
Jasper Morris
Pale color with a reductive nose, which apparently has been the case from fermentation onwards. Toasted dry stones. Then soft and fleshy even a touch lactic. Hard to understand at the moment but may easily get itself back together. Just 1500 bottles made.
Barrel Sample: 89-92
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.