Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Decanter
This was shut down when I tasted it in October, opening in the glass with notes of orange rind, preserved lemon, fresh peach and chalky soil tones. On the palate the wine is full-bodied and concentrated, with a racy line of acidity and a deep, taut core of fruit and minerals. This will need a few years in the cellar to unwind, even in the 2016 vintage.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
When I tasted the 2016 Chablis Grand Cru les Clos it had not yet been bottled. It has a gorgeous honey, nutmeg and oyster shell-scented bouquet that is very harmonious and intense. The palate is well balanced with a slightly honeyed texture, smooth and creamy with the acidity kicking in toward the finish to keep everything balanced. This is a classy, seductive les Clos that should mature with panache.
Range:91-93
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.