Jean-Claude Bessin is a very small grower in Chablis. His importer, Becky Wasserman, brings us many of Burgundy’s biggest names: Mugnier, Lafarge, Bachelet. Of course, nobody in Chablis has that kind of profile except for... Read More

Jean-Claude Bessin is a very small grower in Chablis. His importer, Becky Wasserman, brings us many of Burgundy’s biggest names: Mugnier, Lafarge, Bachelet. Of course, nobody in Chablis has that kind of profile except for Dauvissat and Raveneau. So, while Bessin, like all of Becky’s growers, does everything right in the vineyard and in the winery, he does so out of the spotlight.

But make no mistake: Bessin’s wines are top-notch. Chablis is all about terroir: its chalky soil and varying expositions expressed through the lens of Chardonnay. Bessin focuses on the terroir with sustainable farming, indigenous yeast fermentations, almost no new oak. There’s nothing to obfuscate the minerally sense of place he coaxes from his old vines. He was trained as an architect and you can feel something three-dimensional in the structure of his wines. Old vines can give a wine a sense of verticality, a height to complement the breadth of flavors. But there’s something more than just old vines here. Bessin is a first-rate talent.