Tasting Notes
Vinous 92+
Bright, pale yellow. Reticent aromas of white peach, lemon and resiny oak, with a violet topnote. Suave, full and quite dry, in fact downright austere on the back half. A more opulent but less refined style than the Montee de Tonnerre or Butteaux but at the same time almost musclebound today and very difficult to taste. Blanchots makes a heavy wine in the hot years, notes Raveneau, adding that this holding features the estate’s oldest vines.
Robert Parker 95
Raveneau’s 2006 Chablis Blanchots " from some of the estate’s oldest vines " represents a jump in quality, and not just on account of its expected richness, but also for its clarity, satiny textural allure, flavor diversity, and sheer concentration. Brown-spiced apple, apricot, toasted nuts, meat stock, and tactile chalky minerality mingle in a complex colloquy, and for all of this wine’s opulence, the persistence of mineral dimensions it exhibits is extraordinary. I would expect this to reward at least 10-12 year’s aging. Bernard Raveneau is an unabashed partisan of his 2005s " and no wonder, based on the subset of those that I tasted, including a magnificent Valmur which he rightly terms a oecompletea and a oeclose to his ideal.a Raveneau is less effusive in praise of his 2006s " each of which I tasted from a selection of barrels " opining that lavish fruit and richness are precisely this collection’s fortes. I think he underestimates the depth of his own 2006s, and only hope I have opportunity to revisit some of them in five or ten years. Importer: Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 524-1524
