Château Pichon Baron: vertical tasting from 2000-2020
Yohan Castaing visits Pauillac second grand cru classé estate Château Pichon Baron, one of the crown jewels of the Bordeaux classified growths, for an exceptional 21-vintage vertical tasting.
‘I think it’s time for a vertical tasting of Château Pichon Baron,’ said Christian Seely, managing director of AXA Millésimes, the company that owns this crown jewel of the Bordeaux classified growths.
He made this announcement to me in perfect French but with a just a hint in his voice of that understated British humor many feel is indispensable to any native of Great Britain.
Scroll down to see tasting notes & scores for every Château Pichon Baron wine from 2000-2020
This was an invitation impossible to refuse, especially since this property is such a legendary estate in the region.
History of the estate
Its origins date back to 1689 when Pierre Desmezures de Rauzan bought some parcels of vines near Château Latour to create what he then called Enclos Rauzan. These vines were part of the dowry of his daughter Therese for her marriage to Baron Jacques Pichon de Longueville in 1694, who then founded the estate that same year.
In 1850, the property was divided in two. One part remained the property of Baron Raoul Pichon de Longueville and formed what we call today Château Pichon Baron, while the other part went to his three sisters to form Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, or Pichon Comtesse for short.
In 1851, the baron ordered the construction of the Renaissance-style castle that is still an eye-catching landmark today with its witch-hat turrets. In 1933, the Pichon de Longueville family sold the estate to the Bouteiller family who owned it for nearly 50 years.
In 1987, AXA Millésimes bought the estate with the ambition of restoring the reputation of its wines, whose luster had dimmed. The estate was managed by Jean-Michel Cazes, owner of nearby Château Lynch-Bages, until 2000, when Christian Seely took charge.
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The estate in Christian Seely’s hands
English by birth, Christian’s father, James Seely, was the author of a remarkable book about Bordeaux wines on which Christian collaborated in the modest role of chauffeur and research assistant.
Prior to that, he had studied literature at the University of Cambridge, but somehow the combination of letters and wine labels led to him being recruited in 1993 by AXA Millésimes, subsidiary of the French insurance group that owned several wine estates, to manage their new Portuguese investment: the iconic Quinta do Noval in the Douro Valley.
In 2000, he was promoted to the position of managing director of AXA Millésimes.
Since then, Christian Seely has brought about both a stylistic evolution and a qualitative leap for the wines he had come to know and appreciate alongside his father.
To do so, he worked closely with his technical teams and in particular with Jean-René Matignon, the recently retired technical director of Pichon Baron, whose successor is Pierre Montégut.
Together they set out on their quest for excellence by implementing a more contemporary approach to viticulture and wine production and sought a better understanding of the estate’s terroirs to achieve greater precision for the match between soils and grape varieties.
This led to a reduction in the amount of Cabernet Franc in the vineyard, in favour of Cabernet Sauvignon, but Seely also made the crucial decision to source the grapes for the main wine only from the historic core of the 73ha vineyard, a 20ha parcel of old vines located just opposite Château Latour.
This understandably led to a considerable drop in production levels for the grand vin itself. It was a factor in the stylistic evolution seen since Seely arrived to take charge, clearly evidenced by this vertical tasting.
The evolution of style
Where the stylistic evolution of Pichon Baron is most evident is the trend toward wines that were less dense and oaky at a time when that very style was so desired.
This is a sign of Seely’s forward thinking, as we now know that such wines do not often go the distance after one or two decades, or at least not with the elegance that we expect of them.
Seely and his team have endowed the wines of Pichon Baron with more liveliness thanks to finely etched tannins as well as judicious acidity, providing both an appealing juiciness when young and remarkable aging capacity.
The overt oakiness of some past vintages, especially those from hot, ripe years, has vanished.
‘We have to make wines for contemporary consumers, and they ask us for wines that can be enjoyed when young and yet last for a long time,’ he explained during the tasting.
Today, Pichon Baron has become one of the great references of Bordeaux with its own singular style, one that even embraces a degree of delicacy and airiness that contrasts greatly with the sterner and more formidable substance of the past.
Tasting Pichon Baron 2000-2020
The 2016 and 2019 vintages are two superlative incarnations of Seely’s ambition for the estate, presenting wines of stunning purity and aromatic precision but also endowed with the vivacity, depth, and persistence on the palate that we expect of pedigree Cabernet Sauvignon wines.
This exceptional vertical tasting provided convincing testimony of Seely’s ambition.
It seems evident that the period starting in 2000 – a vintage when Jean-Michel Cazes was still in charge of the harvest and vinification before Seely took over for the crucial blending stage – and including 2004, was a necessary time of adaptation.
From 2005 onwards, the new style of Pichon Baron began to emerge, as the wines became less oaky and had a finer tannic structure that was more vertical than horizontal in nature.
With the 2007 vintage, the change toward a more seductive style is even more evident, although the oak influence seems more apparent at this stage.
The following three vintages – 2008, 2009 and 2010 – bring the pedigree of this classified growth into greater focus.
Then comes the impressive trilogy of challenging Bordeaux vintages of 2011, 2012 and 2013, which clearly demonstrate the estate’s technical mastery.
The crystalline delicacy and freshness of 2014 points the way to the current style, so beautifully exemplified by both 2016 and 2019, which will surely remain beacons of Pichon Baron at its finest, ones that will shine over the next two to five decades.
See tasting notes and scores for Château Pichon Baron wines from 2000-2020:
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Bordeaux native Yohan Castaing is a freelance journalist, based in France. He reviews wines from the Loire, Languedoc, Roussillon, Provence, southwest France and Champagne houses for The Wine Advocate. He founded Anthocyanes, a French wine guide, and Velvety Tannins, a guide to the wines of the Rhône Valley. He also writes for wine publications including Gault&Millau and Jancis Robinson. Castaing has held a variety of positions in the wine industry such as wine buyer and marketing director. He was a wine marketing consultant and the author of several books about wine marketing and wine tourism before, in 2011, he became a full-time freelance wine journalist focusing on the industry and wine reviews.