Reluctant to leave Burgundy without doing at least one wine-tasting, we took a drive to Chablis – an easy 15km from Auxerre, and of course the home of the appellation Chablis. You drive past vineyards and through several wine villages to get there, and it’s all very picturesque.
Chablis is affluent, they say, because the world loves its wine. According to the wine négociant (merchant) who devoted nearly an hour of his time to us, in a spectacular 13th-century cellar in Rue des Moulins, just off the main square, its popularity is down to three things: firstly, Chablis is an easy name that everyone can pronounce; secondly, its small area and limited production of only 40 million bottles per year makes it relatively rare in comparison, say, to Bordeaux or Champagne; and thirdly, it’s agreeably light and easy to drink.
3 more Chablis facts:
* Chablis is always 100 percent from the chardonnay grape, unlike in some other countries where you can call a wine a chardonnay if it contains a certain percentage of that grape: 65 percent in California, we hear, or 55 percent in Australia.
* Chablis gets its distinctively dry, pure and mineral-y character from a unique terroir that contains a subsoil layer of fine, fossilised oyster shells known as Kimmeridgian clay, after Kimmeridge Bay in England.
* Officially regulated in 1938, Chablis comes in four different levels, described as: Petit Chablis, Chablis, Premier Cru and Grand Cru. At the cellar, prices ranged from around €11; we took away a Premier Cru (2015) and a Grand Cru (2008) for about €20 and €40 respectively. As it happens, we both definitely preferred the first one to the second one when we opened both bottles to enjoy with oysters on the rocks at Cancale (in Brittany) a week later.
* If you don’t like chardonnay, it may be because the New World expressions of it are often so big and bold, over-wooded and generally in your face. Chablis is none of those things; it’s seldom wooded, for one thing – and if so, only very slightly.
Awful Offal in Chablis
It was all my fault, and I put it down to the wine I’d been tasting on an empty stomach. Ensconced in the sunny courtyard of a Chablis restaurant, I fancied some chicken for a change, decided for some unknown reason that andouillette was a chicken dish, and ordered it for both Roy and myself.
Bad mistake! – it turned out to be a traditional Burgundian sausage made from pork intestines, so gamey I could hardly eat more than an inch of it. Roy did a little better than I, but wasn’t at all happy. Look at the photo and be warned – the andouillette is that phallic object squatting unappetisingly on my plate.
