Author: TERROIR Editorial

The white soils of Chablis are not soil in any ordinary sense. Pick up a handful of the chalky marl from a Premier Cru slope above the Serein, and what you are holding is a Jurassic seabed: roughly 150 million years of compressed shell, much of it the fossilized cup of a small oyster called Exogyra virgula. That fossil bivalve appears again on the Sancerre côte two hundred kilometers to the southwest, and again, in coarser form, in the Kimmeridgian outcrops that surface from Champagne through the Loire. The geologists call it the Kimmeridgian seam. The vignerons call it luck.…