The history of wine-making in Chablis goes back to 865 AD with the development of vineyards by the monks of Saint-Martin-de-Tours on slopes facing the Serein River that cuts through that village. At that time and for the centuries that followed, the Chablis wine trade grew substantially thanks to the waterways that made it possible to supply Paris from Auxerre.
With the French Revolution, estates changed hands but remained successful, and the total vineyard surface area reached 38,000 hectares. The end of the 19th century saw the coming of phylloxera in 1887, which wreaked havoc and reduced the vineyards to almost nothing.
It was only at the beginning of the 1960s, when the Chablis vineyard surface area was less than 1,000 hectares, that Chablis wine production took off again with the growth of mechanization and setting up of anti-frost systems (another plague for the vines of the region).
The current productive vineyard surface area is 4,580 hectares.
It is so rare to find good, traditionally styled Chablis at a reasonable price these days. This wine is crisp and mineral as you would want from this region but the 2009 also has a nice rich, almost peachy quality. There’s a great fresh backbone to this wine that gives it some real life.
