In the hands of the best growers—and there are not that many in this sparsely populated but fêted Loire village—a Sancerre from Chavignol can, to paraphrase the late, great Leonard Cohen, draw the hallelujah. In powerful vintages, you’ll find a wine of deep, rippling Chablis-like texture—perhaps unsurprising as they share the same terres blanches soils—and characteristics of stone fruit and ripe citrus shot through with fresh-cut herbs and seams of earthy, limestone minerality. Try a wine from Monts-Damnés next to a top Grand Cru Chablis and you’ll see what we mean. These years can imbue Chavignol’s best wines with a somewhat closed and inward-looking personality—wines that sometimes require years in the cellar to decompress before revealing their inner secrets. In other years, such as 2023, Chavignol can also give it to you straight: cutting and immediate, like a boxer’s jab rather than the devastating, slower arc of the right hook. Scintillating was a word Sophie used when we tasted through the new releases. Spot-on. In some years, the wines can also taste like a metamorphosis of the best parts of Caillerets and Kirchspiel; sublimely textured, yet pure and linear with the weave of acidity and minerality working like a propellant, invoking the tension and rocky finesse of the wine’s cooler-climate Ligérien side. 2023 is one of those years. A little bit of history helps us understand what makes Chavignol’s wines considered the apex expression of Sancerre and the sui generis of Sauvignon Blanc. Despite its proximity to the town itself, this small village (about a third the size of the Chablis Grand Cru) has a proud identity. For centuries before the advent of the Sancerre appellation, the Boulay family and their peers had long bottled their wines under the name ‘Chavignol’. In 1956, Pierre Bréjoux—a high-ranking official at the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine—noted in his Les Vins de Loire that the name Chavignol on the grower’s label seemed to take on greater importance than the word Sancerre. Indeed, the Boulays’ famed Comtesse vineyard on Monts-Damnés was only grafted after 1945, making it France’s last ungrafted white-grape vineyard, as la Romanée-Conti was for red grapes. Many years later, when Didier Dagueneau finally acquired a slice of Chavignol after years of waiting, he wanted to call his wine simply Chavignol to differentiate it from the rest of Sancerre. This place commands such renown from inside and outside the village because of the steep Kimmeridgian marl terroir that transcends the variety grown here; the wines are more fleshy and opulent and less varietal. To be more accurate, we are talking about a specific type of limestone, locally called terres blanches, or white earth. Terres blanches is the uppermost lithologic zone of the Kimmeridgian, created over time by the compact melding of limestone and clay caused by the older, decomposing Saint-Doulchard marls. In the Sommelier's Atlas of Taste, Jordan Mackay put it well when he explains Chavignol’s Sancerre “reflects the dense, seamless integration of clay and limestone particles, somehow offering the robustness of clay and the mineral energy of limestone at the same time”. He goes on to highlight the (general) difference between the wines grown in this terres blanches terroir and those grown in Sancerre’s other two soil types, caillottes and flint. “The wines can be brooding and this with earthy aromas, a far cry from the bright citrus and grass of mainstream Sancerre. Indeed, in years past, these Chavignol wines have been denied the Sancerre appellation in tasting by the region’s wine board because they are so atypical.”