Winemaker Notes
Gourmand, Grand Cru Vaudésir nose reveals notes of rhubarb and acacia flower. Fine and elegant in the mouth, with buttery, brioche aromas, and a dominant hint of coconut. Serve between 53-57°F, it must be aired or decanted before tasting.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
100% on the north-facing side. A fresher wine from this warm Grand Cru site. Very attractive gently reductive nectarines and mangoes. Sweetly perfumed and full of energy. Mouthwatering. The palate has a very powerful, very composed and concentrated core of exotic fruits. Succulent.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Notes of Meyer lemon, oystershell, crisp pear and subtle reduction introduce the 2016 Chablis Grand Cru Vaudésir, a medium to full-bodied, pure and structured wine with serious concentration and chewy extract that compensates for what it lacks in acidic cut. It's the most ample and giving of the three grand cru bottlings in the Louis Michel cellar this year, but it remains quite classic in profile.
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Decanter
The Vaudésir is the ripest and most giving of the three grand cru bottlings in the range this year, offering up an expressive bouquet of peach, preserved lemon and flowers. The wine is textural, full-bodied and concentrated, with notable extract buttressed by ripe but succulent acids that evoke the wines of the 2015 vintage.
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.