Description
Domaine Raoul Gautherin, Chablis “Vieilles Vignes”
A wine like Domaine Raoul Gautherin’s Chablis “Vieilles Vignes” makes my job very easy. I don’t have to work up an alluring pitch for some obscure grape variety, nor tug at your emotions with a poignant backstory. All I must do is be hand-on-my-heart honest and tell you this 2019 old-vine cuvée is arguably the best “village” Chablis we’ve tasted in years.
This is Chardonnay superiority of the highest order, combining mineral rigor and vivid freshness with the texture and depth that’s normally exclusive to the region’s finest Premier Cru bottlings. And at $39, it represents one of the finest white Burgundy values we’re likely to offer in 2023. The only hard part of my job today is breaking the following news: there is painfully little to go around. This is a Chablis shooting star, rarely seen and easily missed; act quickly so you can watch it blow away the competition over the next couple of years!
BONUS: Want to further elevate your old-vine Chablis game? Click here to secure a few bottles of Gautherin’s Premier Cru ‘Montmains.’
Few wineries in Chablis, or even all of Burgundy, can claim the historical roots of Domaine Gautherin. The Gautherin clan has farmed vines in the village since 1585, and in the late 1950s became some of the first to produce and bottle their own wine. Raoul’s grandson Adrian, who grew up helping his grandfather and father in the vineyards, took the reins in 2008. Adrian focuses almost entirely on the vineyards, not the cellar; he often tells the story of how, on his first day of winemaking class, the professor told the students “you can’t make great wine without great grapes” and sent them all to see the viticulture professor instead. Adrian has maintained that ethos for the past 15 years, eliminating synthetic herbicides in the vines and limiting yields. His goal is to grow the most beautiful fruit possible to ensure minimal intervention in the cellar.
Adrian’s “Vieilles Vignes” bottling is sourced from his oldest and most prized village-level holdings, all planted in the region’s signature Kimmeridgian limestone, all over 35 years old. That’s especially pertinent here in Chablis. Most other producers have, over the past three decades, replanted their vineyards to newer, higher-yielding clones (yes, even in the Premier and Grand Crus). Adrian resisted that urge, and perhaps this accounts for the wine’s hierarchy-bucking concentration and aromatic breadth. But this isn’t one of the oily, tropical, un-Chablisienne bottlings we often see thanks to warmer vintages. Instead, it’s an incredible balancing act: snappy Kimmeridgian minerality and brightness serve as the perfect counterpoint to the cuvée’s textural depth and concentration.
To maintain those hallmarks, Adrian ferments entirely in stainless steel, ages the wine in third-pass French barrels, then puts it back into stainless to tighten everything up. (It’s worth noting this technique is one used by producers like Lafon and Roulot, who’ve been most deft at maintaining brilliantly mineral wines in the face of climate change).
Poured into a Burgundy bowl at just below cellar temp, the nose here is awash in unadorned Chardonnay beauty. Beautiful yellow apple, ripe white peach, lime leaf, green apple skin, and acacia flowers join classic sea spray, crushed chalk, and oyster shell minerality. It’s medium-bodied and generous on the palate with washes of snappy acid keeping it all wonderfully fresh. That everpresent tension between aromatic richness and exacting minerality is hardly ever seen at this village level. I frankly can’t think of anywhere else I’d want to spend my hard-earned Chablis dollars. But like I said, you’ll have to act fast!
