2023 Gerard Boulay Les Monts-Damnes Sancerre, Loire Valley

Just like any other well-known wine region in France, Sancerre has its own de-facto vineyard hierarchy. Officially endorsed or not, there’s no doubt that Sancerre’s greatest sites (barring an exception or two) are concentrated around the hamlet of Chavignol. Chavignol’s steep, south- and southeast-facing limestone slopes—home to historically revered sites like Les Monts-Damnés, La Grande Côte and Le Clos de Beaujeu—are, without doubt, the most potent terroirs of Sancerre.

It’s no fluke that the top wines from this village regularly draw comparisons to the great white wines of the world. Nor is it a fluke that this tiny village is home to an unusual concentration of Sancerre’s most revered winegrowing families (including of course the feuding Cotat cousins). In Chavignol, the best wines have little (or nothing) to do with varietal character. They are fleshier, rippling, and more textural; the grape simply plays conduit to the mineral freshness of the limestone-rich soils and the sun trapping, south-facing exposition. 

To give you an idea of how coveted this soil is, when Didier Dagueneau decided he wanted to grow in Sancerre, he waited years until a slice of Chavignol became available; he wouldn’t settle for anything less. Dagueneau also wanted to call his wine simply, “Chavignol”—to differentiate it from the rest of Sancerre and because this was the historical label for the region’s wines—but this was not permitted by the AOC authorities. 

Monts-Damnés (pronounced mon-dannay) is perhaps the best-known vineyard in Chavignol. Drinking some great juice from this site leaves you in little doubt that Chavignol is home to some of the most textural, mineral, uplifting and sublime Sancerre’s. Boulay’s bottling comes from 45-year-old vines on one of the steepest inclines of this majestic vineyard, a 40° south-facing plot on terres blanches soil (white, chalky clay and limestone) directly adjacent to Vatan’s Clos la Néore vineyard. It’s a parcel of vines that gifts a wine of great hedonism and complexity. Boulay vinifies this cuvée in three- to four-year-old Rousseau Tronçais oak casks before finishing its aging in large cask before bottling.

While the steeply sloped, south-facing Mont-Damnés (pictured below) is one of Chavignol’s warmest sites, this superb wine walks a perfect tightrope between ripeness and texture and that invigorating sense of tension that makes Boulay’s Sancerre so compelling. A distillate of its site, the new release is deep yet compact and rocky, awash with racy stone fruit, orange blossom and crushed oyster shell tempered by a mouthwatering mineral spine and a nibble of quinine and chalky phenolics. The marriage of density and energy is seemingly perfect. Again, give it time to blossom, or enjoy this stellar release young with ceviche, tuna tartare or sashimi—that kind of thing.