Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
The Preuses is the king of the cellar in 2016, offering up a classic nose of white flowers, oyster shell, salty soil tones and hints of citrus pith - as Vincent Dauvissat likes to remark, Preuses is really not about fruit. On the palate the wine is concentrated, texturally refined and complete, with lovely tension and understated depth. Like Les Clos, this will need a few years in the cellar to blossom.
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Wine Spectator
Rich, well-structured and intense, this white evokes white peach, melon, lemon, stone and spice aromas and flavors. Complex and long, with a chalky feel on the lingering finish. Best from 2019 through 2025.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Chablis Grand Cru les Preuses has a refined bouquet with lemon thyme, mint and oyster shell—very focused and detailed. The palate is fresh and poised, quite energetic on the entry and maintaining that level right up until the saline finish, which has just the right amount of bitterness to urge you back for another sip. This feels tighter than Patrick's other crus at the moment and as such, I would afford it two, possibly three years in bottle.
Rating: 92+
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.