Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Not many people have vines in Séchet, but they all make excellent wines - and none more so than Samuel Billaud. Iodine and oyster shell aromas segue into a pithy, shuttered, yet beautifully balanced palate.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The insider's choice at this domaine is the superb 2017 Chablis 1er Cru Séchet Vieilles Vignes, a terrific wine that is amply living up to its promising showing 12 months ago. Unfurling in the glass with notes of ripe citrus fruit, white flower, crushed chalk and oyster shell, it's medium to full-bodied, ample and layered, with an elegantly textural attack, excellent concentration and the racy acids so typical of this site. The finish is long and penetrating. This comes warmly recommended.
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.