Chablis Cotes aux Pretes Beru 2018

Chablis Beru Cotes aux Pretes, biodynamic Chablis, low sulphur Chardonnay, elegant yet rich and beautifully balanced Chablis. Chablis has suffered like many of France’s great regions from the damage of mass production for the supermarkets, driving price and quality down. Genuine Chablis should always be a wine that stands at the top of restaurant wine lists and comes out of the wine rack for special occasions. Real Chablis, is both elegant yet rich and concentrated, racy but also with depth of flavour and layers of minerality. Chateau de Beru achieves all that in spades. Simply beautiful white wine. Cotes aux Pretes or ‘Hill of the Priests’, refers to the nearby paths followed by pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. This spectacular vineyard, perched on the top of the hill of Béru overlooking the magnificent Chateau forms a dome of vines which are beautifully exposed to sunlight and produce very ripe grapes which make for a richer and more style of Chablis. Like all the wines now Cotes aux Pretes is verylow in sulphites, not because Athenais is obsessed with sans soufre wines but because she is finding that as time moves on and her terroir is surging back to life following the introduction of biodynamics over a decade ago, there is less and less need for sulphur to preserve the freshness of the wine. Furthermore, Athenais finds the lower the suphur the truer the expression of the wine and terroir.

Chateau de Beru is a 400 year old domaine hosting some of the best terroir in Chablis.

It is a magnificent estate, full of grandeur and history. The ornate rooms are filled with paintings and furniture that date back centuries. Staying there is like stepping back in time to pre-revolutionary France with 4 poster beds and stunning views across the walled vineyards and hills of Burgundy. For centuries the potential of the beautiful 17th century estate went unrealised until in the 1980s Count Eric de Beru, fuelled by his passion for wine replanted the vines including the unique walled vineyard, Clos Beru! When he became ill the vineyards were rented and the grapes sold to the cooperative until in 2004 his daughter Athenais took over and revolutionised the estate, finally realising its great potential. After a visit to Argentina and an encounter with coffee farmers using biodynamics to produce their beans, she returned home and despite some resistance convinced her parents that the future of their wine lay in biodynamic production. Athenais has been working the 15 hectares of vines with biodynamic methods since 2008 and since then the quality and purity of the wines has soared. She is blessed with fabulous Chablis terroir, calcareous-clay soils of the Kimmeridgien era (notably with deposits of fossilised oysters dating back 150 million years ago) at 300 metres above sea level. Only using natural methods including horse rather than tractors, can this hallowed ground be protected and maintained. The wines are pure and alive and marry intensity with immense finesse. Athénaïs has also joined the 'Femmes et Vins de Bourgogne' (Women and Wines of Burgundy) an association set up to enable talented female wine makers - who are unfortunately still scarce in Burgundy - to share their experience and passion. Recently she has started to ferment a very small amount of fruit with the skins in Amphorae to make tiny quantities of orange wines, watch this space, we will get some, although not much!