Domaine Francois Cotat Sancerre La Grande Cote 2024

La Grande Côte is widely considered the most flamboyant of François Cotat's four vineyard bottlings, and the site itself explains why: a full south-facing slope where the soil is almost exclusively chalk — the very same Kimmeridgian seam that runs beneath Chablis, prized for the energy and salinity it lends to Sauvignon Blanc. François inherited these old vines from his father when he and his cousin Pascal split the family domaine in 1990, and he farms his tiny four-hectare estate with almost obsessive care: densely planted vines, deliberately low yields, and a late harvest that lets the fruit reach real ripeness before picking. In the cellar, the approach is defiantly old-fashioned — hand-harvested fruit pressed on an old wooden vertical press, fermented on indigenous yeasts in ancient demi-muids, and racked and bottled according to the lunar calendar, all unfined and unfiltered.

Where sibling bottlings like Monts Damnés lean chiselled and austere, La Grande Côte carries real depth and generosity: pink grapefruit, orange peel, and beeswax meet chalky minerality and spring flowers, often with a riper, almost tropical edge — guava, passionfruit, lychee — in warmer vintages, though it never loses its fine acid backbone or tactile, stony structure.