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
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Decanter
When Samuel Billaud split from Billaud-Simon, he managed to retain his favourite plot within Vaillons. Lovely colour here - just a touch of brilliant gold flashes in the glass. So pure! Crystalline, stone fruit character and some floral notes on the palate with great finesse and concentration. An ultra-fine expression of Sechet.
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Jasper Morris
As with the 2020 this has the most brilliantly balanced bouquet. Wow! What concentration without any form of excess, except maybe the stony aspect. The incredible intensity of the vintage shows to the fore, white fruit throughout, leading to an extraordinarily fine finish. This wine has been raised in tank for all its 18 months elevage, before bottling in May.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Chablis 1er Cru Séchet Vieilles Vignes is wonderful, offering up enticingly marine aromas of citrus oil, oyster shell and rock salt. Medium to full-bodied, satiny and concentrated, it's layered and multidimensional, with superb depth at the core, racy acids and a long, chalky finish. As ever, it's one of Billaud's finest cuvées.
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.