Petit Chablis 2022 | Domaine Passy le Clou | Famille Descombe | Burgundy

Gérard Patrice had been making wine in Chablis for years and had no children to leave the house to. In 2017 he sold it to Marine Descombe, and so a Beaujolais family ended up running an estate in Beine.

The Descombes are not newcomers to wine, but they are to Chablis. Their story starts in 1905, when François Descombe was mayor of Saint-Étienne-des-Oullières, at the foot of Mont Brouilly. Marine is the fifth generation, and the first to work outside Beaujolais.

The estate is thirty hectares spread across twenty-one plots. They are vinified separately, one by one, with a team of seven: that is a decision about scale, because blending the fruit into a single tank would be far simpler and would erase the differences between them.

The soil is textbook Kimmeridgian marl: clay and limestone with loose stone, packed with fossil oysters.