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 a 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 Cote d'Or and Paris, but it is separated from the Cote 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.

The 260 acres of the Vaillon Premier Cru, located on the left bank of the river Serein, in the middle of the slope, southwest of Chablis, are particularly well-exposed and enjoy an excellent reputation.

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