Producer: Domaine de la Pauliere, owned by Jean Durup, who is the largest producer of Chablis. The Durup family, have been winegrowers for generations, cultivating the vineyards of Chablis for centuries. Jean Durup reassembled the vineyards of the Château de Maligny, an estate managed during the last century by Paul Gally, his great grandfather. The overwhelming percentage of ideally exposed hillsides, flinty soil and steep slopes, guarantees wines of exceptional quality.

Grape: Jancis Robinson described Chardonnay "as the tart of the grape world, as it would lie down anywhere and do what the winemaker told it to do!".

In other words it will grow almost anywhere and produce decent and quite stylistically different wines ranging from minerally Chablis, Champagne, buttery fruit wines, tropical fruit wines or oaky vanilla wines. During the late 1990's Chardonnay was the drink of choice for many. However people became bored with the oaky wines found in so many bars and the term, "Anything but Chardonnay" came about.

The ubiquitous yet noble Chardonnay grape has virtually become a brand name. From its homeland in Burgundy, its fame and fortune have taken it all over the world. It’s grown on different soils in varying climates to be used either as a single varietal or in blends, for still and sparkling wines, and with or without oak ageing to create a wide range of wines with diverse personalities. As a result, it’s impossible to describe a typical Chardonnay. For a start, the grape can make anything from an everyday glugger to a high-quality wine deserved of ageing. Its popularity in the vineyard stems from the fact that it’s easy to grow, consistently yielding generously with relatively high sugars (and, therefore, alcohol). In the winery its advantages are obvious – it’s difficult to make a poor wine from it, unless it’s been picked too late, because then its acid levels fall quickly, which make it flabby. Chardonnay isn’t strongly aromatic: some detect anything from apples (or barely ripe apples in Chablis) and melon in Maconnais Chardonnay to tropical fruit flavours in New World examples. Common descriptives, however, tend to refer to texture and weight rather than flavour – buttery for broader styles, such as Meursault from the Cote de Beaune; steely for Montrachets and nutty for Corton-Charlemagne. There’s an attractive leanness to fine Cote d’Or white burgundy, that sets it apart from Chardonnays from the rest of the world, but this can be emulated further south in the Cote Chalonnaise and Maconnais in good vintages with clever winemaking.

Region: Chablis is a sub-region of Burgundy just to the northeast of central France, and centred around the town of Chablis. The large land mass around Chablis gives it a continental climate with cold winters and hot summers. The soils here have an important effect on the style of wine produced. On the best sites, limestone is overlaid with Kimmeridgian clay, which is a poor marl-type soil that's high in marine fossils. The best Chablis has a mineral streak to the wine, which is generally considered to come from the soil.

Recently, the demand for Chablis has resulted in the wine-producing region being extended and the new vineyards have limestone-only soils. Wine from this extended area, therefore, often lack the mineral streak and are not perceived to be as good, nor are they as expensive. You can tell whether the wine is from the new or the old region by the name on the label - if it says 'Petit Chablis', it's from the new region; if it says simply 'Chablis', it's from the old region. Whatever part of Chablis your wine comes from, it will always be made solely from the Chardonnay grape.