3 double-magnums per lot
Details
Château Pichon-Longueville, Baron
I first met Jean-René Matignon, the cellar-master in 1986. He was racking the barrels of '85 into tank and back into barrel again. The hoses were all of 300 metres and required several pumps. It was the final year of the old régime when costs had to be cut and barrel-to-barrel racking was not viable. I remember well his smile and a little sparkle in his eyes which said : I can do better than this...and since then, all of my first visits as soon as the wines had been made, that smile got wider and that sparkle more noticeable. Indeed he ended up doing not just better but far far better than that. We tasted the wine together and agreed that the base matter was excellent but getting blunted by all this long-distance manipulation and by all the other difficulties in vineyard and cellar caused by running a large estate on a tight budget.
The following year, the Bouteiller family agreed to sell the estate to AXA, putting in CEO Claude Bébéar's Harvard Business School class-mate Jean-Michel Cazes to run it, who brought along with him his technical director from Lynch Bages, Daniel Liose. Daniel and Jean-René got on like a house on fire, the former knowing exactly what it would take to turn the ship around and Jean-René only too happy to be able to do things the way he had always wanted.
But you don't turn such an estate around overnight. It took more than ten years for them to achieve its potential and for Jean-Michel to be able to pass on the château's regained reputation to Christian Seely, fresh up from Quinta do Noval, who from 2001 would take Pichon to an even higher level. The wines we offer today are from those 10 years. It was not the easiest decade of vintages to manage, much less regular than the almost continuously more glorious '00s and '10s, but it was an exciting period of getting the estate back on course and was undertaken in an almost pioneering spirit of getting the job done right. I am so happy at having been a regular observer of this revival during my regular tasting visits and will always be thankful to this team for sharing so candidly with me all their hopes, successes and indeed sometimes failures.
They had inherited rather than made the '86 wine so the first task was to adapt its élevage, with very little investments yet made in the cellar...or for that matter in a tasting room : in March 1987, we tasted the new wine with mud on our shoes in a Portacabin ! The wine turned out to be vastly better than the rather hard and stalky '85, its edges having been filed down by some very astute barrel management. Following that, improvements happened at a fast pace : the start of Les Tourelles in 1988, more and better quality new oak, totally manual harvesting, elimination of pumps, barrel to barrel racking under inert gas (that made Jean-René smile even more). The successive vintages became more and more impressive, especially for the duo '89-'90. For the four rather difficult vintages for Bordeaux, '91 to '94 that followed, they were helped by the new circular fermentation cellar and all the results were of course light but very honorable. Both the '93 and the '94, deliberately under-vinified to avoid hardness, are old now but still soft and pleasing. The much more concentrated '95 is still dark, rectiline and spicy and the best success to date, whilst the '96, has retained a very positive, more boisterous appeal. From then on, the wines just built on each vintage's success : the '97 beating all the other super seconds at our Southwold blind tasting in 2001, the tighter-styled '98 which we all thought was the Pontet Canet, the '99 that we weren't sure wasn't first growth and the '00 in a close match with Léoville Poyferré for the top non-first growth spot.
Since then, in true Pichon style and under the expert guidance of Christian, and with the unfailing support of AXA, there have been ever more developments and improvements, both in the vineyard and by dint of the sparkling new underground cellar. It seems that the sky will definitely never be the limit.
Château Pichon-Longueville, Baron
1993
In original wooden case double-magnum (1)
1994
In original wooden case double-magnum (1)
2000
In original wooden case double-magnum (1)
3 double-magnums per lot
I first met Jean-René Matignon, the cellar-master in 1986. He was racking the barrels of '85 into tank and back into barrel again. The hoses were all of 300 metres and required several pumps. It was the final year of the old régime when costs had to be cut and barrel-to-barrel racking was not viable. I remember well his smile and a little sparkle in his eyes which said : I can do better than this...and since then, all of my first visits as soon as the wines had been made, that smile got wider and that sparkle more noticeable. Indeed he ended up doing not just better but far far better than that. We tasted the wine together and agreed that the base matter was excellent but getting blunted by all this long-distance manipulation and by all the other difficulties in vineyard and cellar caused by running a large estate on a tight budget.
The following year, the Bouteiller family agreed to sell the estate to AXA, putting in CEO Claude Bébéar's Harvard Business School class-mate Jean-Michel Cazes to run it, who brought along with him his technical director from Lynch Bages, Daniel Liose. Daniel and Jean-René got on like a house on fire, the former knowing exactly what it would take to turn the ship around and Jean-René only too happy to be able to do things the way he had always wanted.
But you don't turn such an estate around overnight. It took more than ten years for them to achieve its potential and for Jean-Michel to be able to pass on the château's regained reputation to Christian Seely, fresh up from Quinta do Noval, who from 2001 would take Pichon to an even higher level. The wines we offer today are from those 10 years. It was not the easiest decade of vintages to manage, much less regular than the almost continuously more glorious '00s and '10s, but it was an exciting period of getting the estate back on course and was undertaken in an almost pioneering spirit of getting the job done right. I am so happy at having been a regular observer of this revival during my regular tasting visits and will always be thankful to this team for sharing so candidly with me all their hopes, successes and indeed sometimes failures.
They had inherited rather than made the '86 wine so the first task was to adapt its élevage, with very little investments yet made in the cellar...or for that matter in a tasting room : in March 1987, we tasted the new wine with mud on our shoes in a Portacabin ! The wine turned out to be vastly better than the rather hard and stalky '85, its edges having been filed down by some very astute barrel management. Following that, improvements happened at a fast pace : the start of Les Tourelles in 1988, more and better quality new oak, totally manual harvesting, elimination of pumps, barrel to barrel racking under inert gas (that made Jean-René smile even more). The successive vintages became more and more impressive, especially for the duo '89-'90. For the four rather difficult vintages for Bordeaux, '91 to '94 that followed, they were helped by the new circular fermentation cellar and all the results were of course light but very honorable. Both the '93 and the '94, deliberately under-vinified to avoid hardness, are old now but still soft and pleasing. The much more concentrated '95 is still dark, rectiline and spicy and the best success to date, whilst the '96, has retained a very positive, more boisterous appeal. From then on, the wines just built on each vintage's success : the '97 beating all the other super seconds at our Southwold blind tasting in 2001, the tighter-styled '98 which we all thought was the Pontet Canet, the '99 that we weren't sure wasn't first growth and the '00 in a close match with Léoville Poyferré for the top non-first growth spot.
Since then, in true Pichon style and under the expert guidance of Christian, and with the unfailing support of AXA, there have been ever more developments and improvements, both in the vineyard and by dint of the sparkling new underground cellar. It seems that the sky will definitely never be the limit.
Château Pichon-Longueville, Baron
1993
In original wooden case double-magnum (1)
1994
In original wooden case double-magnum (1)
2000
In original wooden case double-magnum (1)
3 double-magnums per lot
Special notice
On lots marked with an + in the catalogue, VAT will be charged at 7.7% on both the premium as well as the hammer price.
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