Winemaker Notes
Aromas of grapefruit, stones and flowers. A dense and very pure wine, with a marked minerality and coated with notes of white-fleshed fruits.
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
Mid lemon yellow. A prettier ripe lemon bouquet, juicier for once than Vaillons. There is plenty of fruit here, ripe apples, and a well balanced follow through that leaves the mouth tingling but there is enough flesh on the bones too. Quite forward. Barrel Sample: (90-93)
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Vinous
The 2022 Chablis Séchets 1er Cru has a lovely bouquet with orange blossom plus touches of beeswax that gains intensity with aeration. The palate is well-balanced, with a lightly spiced entry and fine depth. It is quite saline in the mouth, with a slice of sour lemon lending tension towards the finish. One of Louis Michel's more complex and intellectual Premier Crus this year.
Barrel Sample: 92-94 -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From another court-noué-impacted parcel that produces relatively small yields—35 hectoliters per hectare, to be precise—the 2022 Chablis 1er Cru Séchets is exhibiting notes of white flowers, lemon peel and beeswax mingling with oyster shell. It is medium to full-bodied, concentrated and racy, with a long, pungently intense finish. Together with Butteaux Vieilles Vignes, it’s one of the highlights of Michel’s premiers crus.
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.