“While the wine shows the freshness and energy of the vintage to full effect, it also possesses the underlying structure and balance to assure a positive aging curve over at least the next decade and probably beyond. That said, I tend to really enjoy this wine, regardless of vintage, on the young side.”

• Josh Raynolds, Vinous

When you taste a wine so good that your knees buckle, your heart flutters, and your brain practically explodes, you know there's something special in your glass. That's almost precisely how the wine team at Mission felt this week after tasting the latest vintage of Domaine Chambeyron-Manin Côte-Rôtie—a wine so good, so special, and so rare that it’s always one of the best wines we taste each year.

What exactly makes Domain Chambeyron-Manin so good? Let's start with the producer.

First off, Christianne Manin and her family operate a small market offering locally-produced meats, cheeses, and produce, including a large amount of vegetables they grow themselves like radishes, spinach, chard, and a variety of lettuces. Her prowess for produce is of high renown in southern France. She also happens to make a small amount of wine.

How small? How about half a hectare!!

Yes, a teeny-tiny half hectare of 40-50 year old Syrah vines is farmed in Côte-Rôtie, of which a mere 165 total cases is made for the entire world!! Farmed entirely by hand, with hard-to-reach wines on steep slopes, the entire process of production is the definition of small artisanship.

As you might imagine, only a small percentage of that wine is shipped to the United States which means the few cases we have currently at Mission represent some of the minuscule bottles made available to American customers as a whole (not to mention the Mission staff members who are also buying this).

What does it taste like? Like the most lush, mouth-filling, concentrated fruit known to man, accented by violets and smoked meats, with a five minute finish that leaves you longing for more.

The 2021 Chambeyron-Manin has yet to be reviewed by Vinous, but the last three vintages have all received 93-94 point scores continuously. We will be out of inventory long before the 2021 review is published, so take our word for it. This wine is always one of the highlights each Fall when we get our tiny allocation.

Available only online due to small allocations, reserve your bottles before they’re gone!

2021 Domaine Chambeyron-Manin Côte-Rôtie $99.99

VINOUS: This tiny domaine owns a mere half-hectare of vines in Côte-Brune and is as traditional a producer as one will find in the northern Rhône. The single wine that they bottle is whole-cluster-fermented in concrete tanks and then aged in neutral oak barrels for 18 months before being bottled without fining or filtration.