2015 Chablis Vaillons
Estimated value
Buying options
Tasting notes
Pale, bright yellow. Very ripe but slightly muted aromas of citrus fruits, white pepper, honey and oatmeal. Quite concentrated but comes across as a bit youthfully aggressive and dry following the set of 2016s here, offering flavors of grapefruit, lemon drop and minerals. Offers noteworthy inner-mouth tension and dusty minerality but this citrussy premier cru will need time to harmonize in bottle. Didier Séguier bottled the 2015 crus in December of 2016 and January of this year. (A second bottle of similar quality was a bit sweeter and more pliant in the middle palate.)
Critic scores
Average Score
Richard Hemming MW, jancisrobinson.com
Stephen Tanzer, Vinous
More reviews and scores
Much more fruit power than their Montmains, and the balance is better for it. Plenty of oyster shell minerality to finish. (RH)
The 2015 Chablis 1Er Cru Vaillons was more reticent than the Montmains at first, with touches of Granny Smith apple and kiwi fruit. It maybe does not quite have the terroir expression of the Montmains. The palate is well balanced with a fine line of acidity, more fatness and a tad more weight than the Montmains, but I was seeking more tension and mineralité on the finish. Not bad, but the 2014 Montmains is better.
Pale, green-tinged yellow. Lemon oil and a floral whiff on the nose. A fruity, pure premier cru stuffed with white peach and pink grapefruit flavors; shows less inner-mouth tension today than the Montmains but Séguier says that this wine "will get its minerality later." A distinctly sunny style of Chablis with good acid cut and a rising finish. With less hail here than in the Montmains, the crop level was a healthier 40 hectoliters per hectares.
About the producer
Established in the late 1950s, William Fèvre was one of the leaders in Chablis’s renaissance. Today he crafts benchmark expressions of fine Chardonnay from some of the top vineyard sites in the region, working with many of the best Premier and Grand Cru vineyards.