91 points Wine Advocate

The 2021 Chablis 1er Cru Vaillons is perfumed and charming, wafting from the glass with aromas of stone fruits, white flowers and youthful reduction, followed by a medium to full-bodied, satiny and charming palate that's seamless and glossy. This will drink well out of the gates.

Guillaume Michel presides over this important 22-hectare estate, which has long been the reference for tank-fermented and -matured Chablis, a style that the Michel family did much to popularize in the 1980s. Intense and tensile wines are the calling card here, pure and unadorned in style and consistently high in quality. Indeed, as I've written before, I sometimes think that Louis Michel is the most underrated of Chablis's larger domaines. The big news at this address is a very welcome shift to Diam closures—with the exception of the Vaulorent that was bottled earlier for reasons explained in the accompanying notes—which should guarantee these wines' graceful evolution in bottle. For this first year, Michel retained his usual 30 parts per million of free sulfites at bottling, which lends the wines a somewhat reductive profile out of the gates; but it isn't overdone and I suspect that many readers, like me, will actually appreciate this quality. Those that don't may want to consider a brief decant.