Maxime Cottenceau

Small crates on limestone slopes

The fruit comes in by hand, in 25-kilogram crates. Maxime Cottenceau, winemaker at Domaine Maxime Cottenceau in Montagny, works from Buxy, where Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Aligoté carry the domaine’s family name. The estate began in 2018, when Cottenceau took control of 2.8 hectares from his family’s holdings and moved from selling fruit toward bottling his own wines. That shift made the cellar answerable to the parcels, not to volume.

His formation is Burgundy in its practical grammar: viticulture and oenology in Beaune, then three years with Vincent Dureuil-Janthial at Domaine Dureuil-Janthial in Rully. The lesson that matters here is not a copied style, but a discipline of timing, handling, and restraint. In Buxy, south of Givry, Cottenceau works inside a grower lineage that had long been rooted in vines. Since 2018, he has made that lineage visible in bottle, with a small holding that has grown toward roughly 10 acres, about 4 hectares, as additional parcels come into the domaine’s work.

Long élevage for Montagny fruit

The method begins before the press. Cottenceau stopped using herbicides, cultivates the soils, and began conversion to organic farming in 2020. Vineyard and cellar actions follow the lunar calendar. On the slopes around Buxy, clay and limestone give Chardonnay its line, while Pinot Noir and Aligoté widen the vocabulary without pulling the domaine away from the Côte Chalonnaise register.

For the whites, the pressing is slow and gentle, with cycles lasting a minimum of three and a half hours and only three rotations. Fermentation takes place in stainless steel tanks or French oak barrels, with little to no added sulfites. The élevage is long for Montagny: 18 to 20 months in barrel, followed by another six months in tank before bottling. The red work is different in gesture, with wooden tanks, a significant proportion of whole bunches, a month’s maceration, pigeage by foot, and a heated post-fermentation maceration. These are cellar decisions made for texture and tension, not polish.

A quiet cellar in Buxy

The cellar reads as a small family domaine rather than a production house. The scale keeps the work close: hand harvest, sorting in the vineyard, sorting again inside, slow press cycles, barrels held long enough for the wines to gather themselves. The tasting room sits within that same rhythm, closer to the bench than to performance.

Montagny is a Chardonnay appellation for white wine, and Cottenceau’s strongest statement remains there, in the premier cru bottlings from named sites. Vigne du Soleil comes from south and southeast-facing vines at the base of Montcuchot, with deep, dark clay and small white limestone stones. Les Bassets gives another reading of the same appellation. The room stays quiet because the work is already speaking through Montagny 1er Cru Vigne du Soleil.