Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
The Vaulorent is a superb achievement in this challenging year, opening in the glass with notes of citrus pith, peach pit, smoke and orange peel. It's a full-bodied, complete wine with serious concentration and extract, and lovely cut. A lovely rendition of this excellent premier cru which touches the grand cru climat Preuses.
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Wine Spectator
A broad-shouldered version, verging on creamy, this delivers apple, honey and sweet spice flavors, punctuated by bracing acidity. Fine length. Drink now through 2022. 239 cases made.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Chablis 1Er Cru Vaulorent has a pleasant nose of yellow flowers and an orange blossom-scented bouquet that comes across as detailed, pretty and winsome. The palate is also pretty with a bit more fatness than Piuze’s other premier crus. There is a touch of brashness about this Vaulorent that I appreciate and everything leads to a saline, lemongrass-tinged finish. This is a delicious Vaulorent from Piuze even if it does not quite match the 2014.
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.