Our vineyard practices and winemaking methods
«A single variety, the Chardonnay | Appellations»
La Chablisienne’s commitment is to ensuring that its members run their vineyards in accordance with the principles of sustainable viticulture.
Our priorities are working the soil, the quality of the vines and intervention on the plant throughout the growing season. Recourse to treatment products must be balanced – the French say ‘reasoned”- to ensure respect for the environment, for the vine itself and for people. All this combined activity converges in the choice of the optimal harvesting date which is determined individually, plot by plot, according to analysis of the crop and the taste of the grapes.
Vinification methods are inspired by the same commitment to getting the utmost from the juice, obtaining the greatest expression from the wealth of potential in Chablis’s supreme terroirs.
Our desire is materialised by what are in fact relatively simple winemaking practices:
· musts tasted and analysed systematically prior to rigorous selection,
· avoidance of any hard and fast approach, so that technical decisions can be reasoned and adapted to each wine,
· tasting as the primary tool,
· choices in vinification made in the light of each terroir,
· winemaking and maturing carried out in stainless steel tanks and in barrels (great care taken in choosing both the oak and the barrels),
· extended barrel-ageing on the lees, depending on each classed Cru,
· totality of each wine bottled at the same time.
