Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Always one of Piuze's finest cuvées at the communal level, the 2018 Chablis Terroir de Courgis is excellent, revealing notes of smoky green orchard fruit, iodine and citrus oil, followed by a medium to full-bodied, layered and enveloping palate that's fleshy and concentrated, with good underlying tension. While this is one of the richer bottlings in its youth, it ages beautifully, and as its puppy fat falls away, it's the wine's firm underlying spine that dominates. Rating: 91+
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James Suckling
From the plot with the deepest clay and older vines, this offers a very glossy, brulée-like nose with underlying peaches and apricots. The palate has weighty fruit. Great now.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2018 Patrick Piuze Chablis Terroir de Courgis is a textbook performance. TASTING NOTES: This wine is bright, zesty, and lingering. Pair its aromas and flavors of tart apple and mineral with a bowl of al dente pasta and clams. (Tasted: September 9, 2019, San Francisco, CA)
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.