2010 Wine of the Year

(IL BORRO, ITALY,  JAN. 2, 2011) What would your Wine of the Year be for 2010? Everyone has a favorite. It has to be a wine that whenever you drink it says something to you. It tells you that it’s special. That it’s a wine that gives pleasure yet shows a great future ahead of it.

That’s why my Wine of the Year for 2010 is the 2003 Château Pichon Longueville Baron, Bordeaux’s second growth Pauillac. Most people simply call it Pichon Baron. The 2003 is a voluptuous wine, with loads of ripe fruit which deliver tar, spice, licorice, treacle tart and light raisin character. The tannins are plush, ripe, and round textured. I have tasted and drunk numerous bottles over the last year, and it’s always a wonderful.

The 2003 Pichon Baron is an old style wine that reminds me of ripe vintages decades ago such as 1959, 1945, or 1929. It’s like a supercharged 1989, which was The Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year in 1992.

A main reason why I choose the 2003 Pichon Baron as my Wine of the Year was because it represents good value for what it is. You can find this formidable red for slightly less than $100 a bottle, according to wine-seacher.com. It was recently sold at auction for $60 a bottle. That’s great Bordeaux for the money, and it has bottle age.

I like the idea of choosing a Wine of the Year that has been in the market but has been slightly overlooked, or forgotten. The 2003 Pichon-Baron has been out in the market for about five years now.

I most recently tasted it yesterday at home (I actually drank it at lunch), and here is my note:

The nose of this wine is amazing with dark berries, treacle tart, tar, and hints of raisins. Full bodied, with velvety tannins. The texture is beautiful, and the richness and freshness of the wine is impressive. It’s so powerful and dense. It goes on for minutes and remains so fresh and clean. Soft and delicious now but will improve with age for decades. 97 points.

The reds of Pichon Baron – and by the way, the second wine, Les Tourelles de Longueville, is always very good quality – relies on the estate’s 170 acres of vineyards planted with about 60 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 35 percent Merlot and the rest Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. Neighbors of Pichon Baron include first growth Latour and second growth Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. Many of Pichon Baron’s vineyards are on the border of St. Julien and Pauillac.

AXA, the French insurance company owns Pichon Baron, along with a small stable of other wineries including Pomerol’s Petit-Village and Sauternes’ Suduiraut. It purchased Pichon Baron in the 1980s and under the guidance of Jean-Michel Cazes, who owns Château Lynch-Bages, the great estate renovated everything from the vineyards to the cellar to the grand fairytale like château. Christian Seely took the reigns of the estate in the early mid-1990s

I asked Seely, the managing director of AXA’s wine investments, to comment on the 2003:

“I think the reason why the 2003 Pichon is great comes down to the old Cabernet vines on the great parcel next door to the chateau overlooking Latour and the Gironde – which in any case define the personality of Pichon. In spite of the hot dry summer, those vines remained well, due to their deep root structure in the beds of gravel, and so the grapes were not stressed by the heat. The resulting wine, although extravagantly ripe and exuberant, is still recognizably a Pichon Baron, with all the balance freshness and structure you expect from Pichon.”

“As it ages in the bottle I think the terroir is asserting itself more and more over the years, and although as you saw it is lovely to drink now, it is settling down to become a great bottle for ageing,” he adds. “Regarding anything we might have done, it boils down to the strict selection that has been operating at Pichon since 2000 (average production of the Grand Vin is now half what it was in the 90s), essentially concentrating on the grand terroirs of Pichon.”

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