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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Jasper Morris
The vines are now 80 years old, on 161/49 rootstock, but they gave a good yield, 30 hl/ha. All in tank where it will stay until next April or May. Pale colour, while the bouquet actually suggests more flesh than we expect from Séchets. Only white fruit, very pure, typically fine dry concentrated finish. Superb aftertaste. Drink from 2025-2030.
Barrel Sample: 92-94 -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Another chiseled classic is the 2021 Chablis 1er Cru Séchet Vieilles Vignes, a medium to full-bodied, racy and layered wine evocative of citrus oil and white currants mingled with apple blossom, beeswax and oyster shells. Saline and penetrating, it was matured for 18 months in tank. Rating: 93+
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.