Pichon Baron

The Grand Vin Château Pichon Baron 2nd Grand Cru Classé in 1855 comes from the very oldest vines grown on the historic plots of the estate. This authentic Pauillac offers an amazing sensory experience with its black fruit flavours and spicy hints. Château Pichon Baron shows great elegance, intensity and exceptional length on the palate. It is a wine that improves year after year and can age for over 40 years in the cellar.

Winemaker notes

2019: Château Pichon Baron reveals a beautiful dark garnet colour with purple hues. The bouquet is precise and very intense, revealing a wide aromatic palette of ripe black fruits and spices. The body is fleshy, creamy, and powerful. The tannins are present and plentiful, without astringency, silky and sleek. It has a beautiful fleshy tension in the mouth, with a sunny and charming style. The finish is elegant, distinguished, with a bright fruitiness. A great wine for ageing as it develops a generous, rich, and elegant fullness.

2015

Wine Advocate 97: Medium to deep garnet-purple in color, the 2015 Pichon-Longueville Baron is enticingly scented of chocolate-covered cherries, crushed red currants and mulberries with touches of baking spices, potpourri and bay leaves plus a hint of fallen leaves. Sumptuously elegant, refreshing and medium-bodied with gorgeous, expressive, perfumed red fruits and very fine, very firm tannins, it has a persistent, perfumed finish. Its remarkable intensity, freshness and very firm frame suggest a long-lived Pichon Baron, which should cellar gracefully for 30+ years.

James Suckling 95: Blackberries, sweet tobacco, incense and currants. Aromatic. Medium to full body and firm, sleek tannins. Racy and refined. Shows lovely balance and finesse. Pretty now, but needs another three or four years of bottle age. Try from 2023.

Vinous 97: The 2015 Pichon Baron offers a delectable mixture of black fruit, mint and violet on its precocious nose that blossoms in the glass. The palate is vibrant, concentrated, delineated and fresh from its sapid entry with immense weight on the finish. Yet this is so tensile that you barely notice the horsepower in this impressive Pauillac that will last years. The 2015 is one of the best from the estate in the 2010s.

Decanter 94: This is big, with well-worked tannins and real impact. It showcases an impressive architectural feel replete with backbone and power. A little burly at this early stage as you would expect, but it is certainly a wine to get carried away by, and it is beautiful to sit back and admire the way it takes on complexity and depth in the glass. 80% new oak.

2019

Wine Advocate 97+: The 2019 Pichon-Longueville Baron will go down as one of this château's great wines of the modern era, along with 2016, 2010 and 1989. Unfurling in the glass with aromas of cassis and plums mingled with notions of cigar wrapper, sweet loamy soil and violets, it's full-bodied, velvety and layered, with superb concentration, lively acids and rich, powdery tannins. Perfumed and resonant, this is a profound young Pauillac that bears more of a resemblance to its neighbor Château Latour than to Pichon Lalande this year. Pichon Baron was one of the great deals of the en primeur campaign, and readers who purchased futures are to be congratulated on their foresight.