1966 | Chateau la Mission Haut Brion

Detailed Description

Very ripe, rich and fleshy, although still with a hard backbone. Deep ruby, brick-red color, ripe, intense raspberry aromas, full-bodied, with ripe, rich raspberry flavors and cedar and tobacco notes.

Reviews:

• Wine Advocate: Even though this bottle is showing a little volatility on the nose, one can still discern a magnificent La Mission. It has an intense, exuberant bouquet of blackberry, dusty attic, cedar and cigar box with smoke and burning embers developing in the glass. The palate is nicely balanced, more sedate than I recall previous bottles with a slight bitterness towards the finish.

• John Gilman: This particular bottle of the 1966 La Mission was not marked by volatile acidity, as had been the case with the last bottle I tried of this wine and which I reported on back in the article on the ’66 clarets several years ago. Consequently, it was a step up in quality and really proved to be a lovely example of the vintage, offering up a complex and very classic nose of cassis, chipotle pepper, dark berries, singed cigars, herb tones, a beautiful base of dark, La Mission soil tones and a smoky topnote. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and beautifully focused, with tangy acids, a fine core of fruit, melting tannins and great length and balance on the black fruity, soil-driven and ever so slightly, horsey finish. A lovely and fully mature vintage of La Mission.

Producer Information

Château La Mission Haut-Brion is an estate in the Pessac-Léognan appellation in the northern Graves, a few miles southwest of Bordeaux’s city center. Its near-neighbor and sister estate Château Haut-Brion was the only estate from the region featured in the 1855 Bordeaux Classification, but La Mission Haut-Brion (rated a Graves Grand Cru in the 1959 rankings) is often judged and priced as the equal of Haut-Brion and the other first growths. The wine is particularly known for its fruit intensity, rounded, generous texture and silky tannins, and has received multiple 100-point ratings from American critic Robert Parker. La Mission Haut-Brion sees 18-22 months aging in barrel, with 80 percent new oak. Between 6000 and 7000 cases are produced each year. La Chapelle de La Mission Haut-Brion has been the second wine since 2006, when it replaced Château La Tour Haut-Brion. The estate also produces two Semillon-based white wines: La Mission Haut-Brion Blanc (formerly Laville Haut-Brion) and, since 2009, La Clarté de Haut-Brion. The latter acts as a combined second wine for La Mission Haut-Brion and Haut-Brion Blanc. The estate takes its name from the Lazarite missionaries who owned it from 1682 until the French Revolution. It has been owned since 1983 by Domaine Clarence Dillon, the owner of Haut-Brion.