Nah.
Never presuppose greatness, not even when the label boldly asserts its status with one evocative word: "Montrachet".
To be frank, my paltry handful of encounters with Montrachets have not been the most rivetting and failed to evince the aura that surrounds the name. At time of writing, I still await my inaugural thrill at the hands of this elixir. There is no agenda at play, no devil's advocate, just an honest scribe for whom a name or status means nothing; fermented grape juice everything.
Yet the enigma that surrounds the vineyard remains undiminished and I remain optimistic that it is just a case of when, not if, my first spell-binding Montrachet arrives. What I must then ask myself is how much of that greatness will be attributal to the grower and how much to the vineyard?
(Right: the most famous vineyard in the world, certainly in terms of white wine. Here photographed just prior to the 2006 harvest, from the bottom, far-right corner where Laguiche's vines grow.)
Before we get down to business, there is the perennial question about whether it is "Montrachet" or "Le Montrachet"? The answer is both, depending upon whether the vignerons' vines inhabit land under Chassagne-Montrachet AC jurisdiction, in which case pedants would insist upon "Le Montrachet" and those produced in Puligny side which should simply be "Montrachet". To complicate matters further, at one time there was also "Grand Montrachet" but I will return to that later.
Henri Cassan mentions a tasting organized by the BIVB in 1987 to compare the two and gauge any tangible differences. They concluded that there were no unique, discernible traits between the two, nor differences in quality and while we are at it, that the lieu-dit "Dents-de-Chien" that was absorbed in Montrachet 1921 was of equivalent quality.
For the record, if I ever attend a tasting where I am pulled up for misappropriating my "Le" vis-a-vis Montrachet, they will be met with a scowling glare that says "Get a life".