Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jasper Morris
This comes from the reverse, and therefore cooler, slope of Vaudésir, good for maintaining yield and management of ripeness in 2019. Even, so the Vaudésir weighs in at 13.8%. Pale to mid lemon colour. Powerful, a, sort of bitter spice, huge weight and tension, but still feels like a massive block of limestone.
Range: 92-94 -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Chablis Grand Cru Vaudésir wafts from the glass with aromas of green apple, crisp apricot, mandarin, fresh pastry and iodine. Full-bodied, satiny and layered, it's textural and enveloping, with a concentrated core of fruit and a long, perfumed finish. This has turned out brilliantly.
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Wine Spectator
A lean and steely white, with moderate apple and earth flavors and touches of herbs and graphite for grace notes. Puts on some weight midpalate, before converging on the stony finish. Drink now through 2026.
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.