Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Fragrant aromas of lemon tart, spring blossom and wet rock mark this gossamer white. Delicate yet intense, leaving a long aftertaste of lemon and mineral. Drink now through 2024.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Chablis "Terroir Vallée Sebillon" comes from 22-year-old vines that cover 0.25 hectares, matured in 75% used barrels and the remainder in vat. It has more vigor on the nose than the Terroir de Decouverte, with chalk and lemon zest aromas and yellow flowers following through later. The palate is well balanced with crisp acidity. It is not a complex Chablis but focused and with a sense of tension on the flinty finish. This is worth seeking out—lively and tensile, I can see this offering four or five years of drinking pleasure and possibly more.
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.