2024 Yannick Alleno & Michel Chapoutier Cotes du Rhone 750 ml

Any Michelin-starred restaurant looking to craft a custom cuvée needs it to be best-in-class. When we're talking about a chef with eighteen stars—the most of any chef in the world? Only the most elite winemakers are eligible.

That's the pedigree we're talking about with Yannick Alléno and Michel Chapoutier's Côtes du Rhône. It's a single-vineyard bottle from one of France's most acclaimed chefs and a man who has forty 100-point scores to his name. This has the power and complexity of wines twice its price, with all the polish and attention to detail you'd expect from two noted perfectionists.

A Master Sommelier friend, who has plenty of experience with Michelin three-star service, explained it this way: "When a restaurant of that caliber creates a custom bottling, it HAS to overdeliver—the only acceptable outcome is to blow guests away." We certainly were.

Yannick Alléno is a chef who has made a career out of the finest of fine dining. He's taken three separate restaurants to Michelin three-star status, and has earned eighteen stars across his restaurants—more than any chef alive. He's obsessed with the "gastronomisation" of terroir—the idea that a chef can use techniques in the kitchen to highlight what's special about the origins of a raw ingredient—which led him to take a deep foray into the world of wine.

His partner is none other than his friend Michel Chapoutier, whose forty 100-point scores anoint him as one of the gods of French winemaking. Chapoutier's roots in the Southern Rhône run deep—his family has farmed the valley for generations, and his holdings and relationships across the region give him an intimate knowledge of its finest sites. For their collaboration, it was the natural place to look.

The Alléno & Chapoutier project draws from a single-vineyard selection in one of the Southern Rhône's most ancient and storied landscapes—the corridor between Avignon, city of the Popes, and the Pont du Gard, the great Roman aqueduct that still stands nearby. Grenache thrives in these terraces of iron-reddened pebbles and marl, and Chapoutier keeps the winemaking restrained: night-harvested fruit, 48 hours of cold pre-fermentation maceration, and nine to twelve months of aging in concrete, allowing the wine to harmonize without the intrusion of oak.

The result is a wine built for the table—elegant, complete, and precisely the kind of thing two perfectionists with a shared obsession make when they're not cutting corners.