Domaine Francois Cotat Sancerre Les Monts Damnes 2024

Robert Parker once called Cotat's Sauvignon Blancs "some of the finest... I have ever put to my lips," and Les Monts Damnés — "the damned mountains" — is widely considered the most chiseled and profound of the entire range. The Cotat family's holdings were historically bottled jointly by two brothers, until their sons François and Pascal split the domaine in 1990, each continuing to work the same legendary parcels under their own separate labels. Monts Damnés sits on an extraordinarily steep slope with virtually no topsoil, pure Kimmeridgian chalk lying almost directly beneath the vines — a site that gives the wine its unmistakable, mineral-driven intensity. True to Cotat tradition, the wine is defiantly old-fashioned in the making: hand-harvested, pressed on an old wooden vertical press, fermented on indigenous yeasts in ancient demi-muids, and racked and bottled according to the lunar calendar, unfined and unfiltered. It's not bone dry, either — a deliberate departure from typical crisp, thin Sancerre, giving the wine real richness and long-term ageing potential most in the category simply can't match.

The result has earned near-mythical status among serious Loire collectors: candied lime, gooseberry, beeswax, and crystalline minerality meet chalk, botanicals, and a whisper of anise, with critics repeatedly describing it as "pungent and long, searching, sappy, and vinous" — Andrew Jefford called it "magnificent terroir wine," likening its aromatics to "a stone-cutter's yard on a hot summer day.