Winemaker Notes
Minerality and salinity define this premier cru that could be a grand cru.
This wine is perfect with grilled or poached fish, eggs cooked in white wine or goat cheese and salad
Professional Ratings
-
Jasper Morris
From upper Chapelot and the central triangle of Montée de Tonnerre itself, with 20% wood. Pale colour with a lime green edge. The bouquet has barely started singing here, but the wine soars on the palate with that sunny generosity of fruit before the crunch of the kimmeridgian fossils. The two sides are beautifully integrated. This wine has a terrific backbone which leaves a clinically dry aftertaste. Really fine. Drink from 2025-2032.
Barrel Sample: 93-95 -
Vinous
The 2021 Chablis Montée de Tonnerre 1er Cru, vinified the same as the Mont de Milieu, has another "serious" backward, saline nose, almost with a slight seaweed scent. Fine acidity in the mouth, the palate is well balanced and very focused with hints of orange rind and apricot rendering it a little more consumer-friendly than the Mont de Milieu. Barrel Sample: 93-95?
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Aromas of citrus zest, oyster shell, clear honey, white flowers and green apple introduce the 2021 Chablis 1er Cru Montée de Tonnerre, a medium to full-bodied, satiny and incisive wine built around tangy acids and chalky dry extract. This taut, structured wine will delight Chablis purists.
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.