100% Chardonnay

Food pairings: Oysters and steamed shellfish, aromatic fish such as sea bream or monkfish, pan-seared white fish, smoked salmon or sushi, white meats in a cream sauce, gougères and snails in parsley butter, and aged goat cheese.

Winemaking: The domaine follows a traditional approach, fermenting and aging its wines mostly in vats with some time in barrel, and bottling them roughly 18 to 24 months after the harvest, so the wine reaches the market with real composure.

Vineyards and terroir: Vaillons sits in the center of the great Premier Cru hillside on the southwest side of Chablis, on steep slopes facing south-southeast over a very limestone-rich Kimmeridgian subsoil of stony clay-limestone. The family holds a little over four hectares here, part of it planted with old vines bottled separately. Among the domaine's Premier Crus, Vaillons is the most typically "Chablisien," a generous, fleshy and incisive wine with a clear imprint of its Kimmeridgian soils.

Family and history: The Dauvissat family has owned this domaine since 1899. Its cellars lie beneath a 17th-century house, the former presbytery of Petit Pontigny, where the road to the hamlet of Chichée begins; they were enlarged in 1980 and keep the wines at 10 to 15°C summer and winter. The first bottlings under the Dauvissat name were made on a small scale in 1963, and in 1978 and 1979 Jean Dauvissat expanded estate bottling, eventually ending sales to négociants. Today his son Sébastien Dauvissat runs the domaine, which is distinct from the other Dauvissat estates of Chablis.

In the pictures: The barrel cellar beneath the family house; the domaine's display of soil samples from each of its climats; and the courtyard of the domaine in Chablis (photos courtesy of Domaine Jean et Sébastien Dauvissat).