Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
This has a round profile, but also good intensity, framing peach, apple, spice and pastry flavors. The tangy acidity resonates on the finish, along with a hint of mineral. Best from 2019 through 2025.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Chablis Grand Cru Blanchots has a fragrant bouquet with lemon curd, white flowers and a touch of nectarine, the mineralité tucked just behind. The palate is well balanced with a fine line of acidity and is quite tensile in the mouth with a brisk, saline, quite linear finish that will take three or four years to really open. Patrick opined that his Blanchots is a mix of the 2014 and 2015 vintages in style, which is not such a bad thing, and I agree.
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Decanter
The Blanchots, from the bottom of the slope, is quite open-knit and friendly in 2016, with an expressive nose of orange blossom, apple and an exotic top note of lavender. On the palate the wine is glossy, full-bodied and giving, with a nice core of succulent fruit and a sapid, saline finish.
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.