A couple of unique factors combine to make Chablis’s terroir-driven flavor profile and refreshing purity a reality. First, Chablis’ northern continental climate delivers cooler temperatures, which translates to the wine’s quintessential laser beam freshness. Second, and most importantly, the soil of Chablis truly sets the mineral-infused wine apart. The signature Kimmeridgian limestone soils deliver a flavor profile 180 million years in the making. During the Upper Jurassic Age, this area was underwater and what remains today is a composition of limestone, clay and fossilized oyster shells that is delightfully unmistakable and is one of the most stunning examples of terroir’s power in the world of wine. If you were to take a stroll through the rolling vineyards, you would almost certainly stumble across some sort of seashell on your jaunt. They are everywhere and what they offer the wine is pure magic. Today’s wine, derived from 15-20 year old vines in the villages of Maligny and Ligny-le-Châtel and Villy, is a soil of chalky clay over Kimmeridgian limestone. This soil, coupled with the cool continental climate, delivers a terroir-driven, textured Chardonnay with a purity that is impossible to capture anywhere else in the world.

 

The Garnier Family has owned their 57-acre estate for decades, but brothers, Xavier and Jérôme, only began crafting and bottling their own wines from their holdings since they took the helm in 1996. Jérôme is the vigneron of the family and utilizes traditional, organic practices that elevate the biodiversity of the vineyards. Xavier serves as the incredibly astute winemaker for the Domaine. Following a manual harvest that takes place later than many of his neighbors, Xavier ferments the wine with indigenous yeasts, which usually takes an average of 5 months. The wine undergoes full malolactic fermentation and is aged on its lees for eleven months in stainless steel prior to fining and filtration. The result is a Chablis that boasts a concentration of fruit and texture that is unusual in a village-level wine, balanced with refreshing acidity and a pure voice of the terroir’s Kimmeridgian soil.