How Chablis Winemakers Are Fighting Back Against Climate Change
The New York Times
Producers are struggling to stave off environmental threats to Chablis’s distinctive character.
Good Chablis is the most distinctive chardonnay wine in the world. I’ve long been convinced of this, and a wine I drank on a recent visit to Chablis reaffirmed my conviction.
It was a 2015 Montée de Tonnerre from William Fèvre, one of Chablis’s best producers. The wine was saline and stony, like drinking liquid seashells. It may sound strange, but it makes sense given that the best Chablis vineyards have Kimmeridgian limestone bedrock and soils, composed partly of fossilized shellfish.
Chardonnay is the world’s most popular wine grape, grown almost anywhere that people make wine. Great chardonnays abound, including some reasonable approximations of the best white Burgundies from the Côte de Beaune, the heart of white Burgundy production. But never have I had a chardonnay that remotely tasted like Chablis, despite claims from wineries worldwide that their wines were “Chablis-like.”
What gives Chablis that singular underlying mineral tang that tastes like no other wine? It’s partly those soils, but also the entirety of its terroir. Chablis is the northernmost part of Burgundy, about 90 miles northwest of the primary white Burgundy regions, on the jagged edge of where, historically, chardonnay could grow.
There, the geology, climate, topography and the beliefs and practices of Chablis’s vignerons combined to produce this remarkable wine. It’s been a fragile equation for decades, as, for much of the 20th century, vignerons struggled to ripen their grapes sufficiently to soften the sharp angles of a wine that could easily be all elbows and knees.
