Terroir Insight: Bouchard Chevalier-Montrachet La Cabotte

One of the iconic wines from the extraordinary vineyard Chevalier-Montrachet vineyard is La Cabotte made by Maison Bouchard Pere et Fils.

Bouchard makes two wines on Chevalier-Montrachet a “regular” cuvee and then the special cuvee called La Cabotte .. from a plot just above the Montrachet holdings of Bouchard.

A special wine indeed and one of the very best whites made in Burgundy .. so lets look at the La Cabotte terroir.

La Cabotte … on the border to Montrachet

La Cabotte is a 0.2104 ha section of Chevalier-Montrachet located just above Montrachet, just north of the border between Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet i.e. above the southern end of the Puligny side of Montrachet – see map below.

The plot is as mentioned located just above the 0.8894 ha plot Bouchard owns in the Puligny section of Montrachet.

La Cabotte is named after a small stone building located in the Chevalier-Montrachet plots just above La Cabotte – see map below.

The history of La Cabotte

The history of the white terroirs is rather erratically described, and the structures of the vineyards have been changed quite a lot until the classfication in 1937.

Starting out with the cadaste maps from 1839 we see that the plot today known as Chevalier-Montrachet La Cabotte was a part of the area called Mont-Rachet – see map below (red dot).

The same was the case in the 1861 classification² where the Puligny side of Montrachet was 10.27 ha including large parts of the current Chevalier-Montrachet.

This is however not consistent with Lavalle¹ who qoutes the area of the Puligny side of Montrachet as 3.953 ha .. very close to the current 4 ha. Lavalle also discuss the term Vrai-Montrachet being the middle part of the Mont-Rachet climate. So Lavalle was pretty stict here more so than the 1861 classification that avoided to confront the delicate question Montrachet or Vrai-Montrachet.

The inconsistenses between Lavalle and the 1861 classification are rather peculiar, as Lavalle mention Chevalier-Montrachet 27,718 ha … but Chevalier was not mentioned at all in the 1861 classification.

Moving on to Rodier⁴ 1920 the Puligny side of Montrachet is still quoted as 3.953 ha also very close to the current size of the vineyard – thus also using the same definition of Montrachet on the Puligny side as Lavalle.

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