Regional info.

The vines around the town of Chablis are all Chardonnay, making a dry white wine renowned for the purity of its aroma and taste: "flinty" or "steely" notes, sometimes described as "pierre à fusil". The Chablis region, along the 48th parallel north, is the northernmost wine district of the Burgundy region.

Chablis lies about 100 miles (160 km) north of Beaune, situated roughly halfway between Burgundy's heartland in Côte d'Or and Paris, but it is separated from the Côte d'Or by the Morvan hills. This makes the region of Chablis relatively isolated from other winemaking regions with the southern vineyards of the Champagne in the Aube department being the closest winemaking neighbour. It is indeed closer to the southern Aube district of Champagne than the rest of Burgundy. The region covers 15 kilometres x 20 kilometres across 27 communes located along the Serein river. The soil is Kimmeridge clay with outcrops of the same chalk layer that extends from Sancerre up to the White Cliffs of Dover, giving a name to the paleontologists' Cretaceous period. All of Chablis' Grand Cru vineyards and Premier Cru vineyards are planted on primarily Kimmeridgean soil which imparts a distinctively mineral, flinty note to the wines.

Côte de Lechet lies on the next south-facing slope to the north of Vaillons and is an excellent source of fresh wines with racy acidity. These characteristics perhaps reflect the cool and temperate nature of the site which is rather exposed to the winds coming up the valley created by the Serein.

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