Wow! Château Pichon Comtesse de Lalande is certainly one of the wines of 2019. It may very well become the wine of the vintage. The grand vin is extraordinarily compelling. It has fabulous levels of concentration and extract but isn’t the slightest bit heavy or overdone and tastes firmly of Pauillac. And while it weighs in at over 14%, it remains fresh and energetic. The tannins are suave and remarkably supple. Winemaker Nicolas Glumineau describes it as a ‘miracle’ wine. For him, his top benchmark previously was the 2010 vintage, but Glumineau feels he now has reached a new level in his own winemaking experience. “2019 is my personal benchmark now. Everything is in balance. There is great concentration but no heaviness. The juice was thick, full of flesh, but not in the bodybuilder sense, the fruit was fresh but not at all jammy.” If the grand vin is terrific Pauillac, Pichon Lalande’s ‘Reserve’ is also very impressive. It represents 50% of the overall crop at Pichon Lalande and was very competitively priced on release. Exciting wines here for sure. I’ll report later on Château de Pez, under the same ownership, in a later post on St Estèphe.

If 2019 is a Cabernet year, and the conditions certainly favoured the Cabernets, then there is no greater expression of this variety than in Pauillac. The Pichons – Château Pichon Baron and Château Pichon Comtesse de Lalande – make for intriguing comparisons each year, competitors set opposite one another over the D2 on the outskirts of the town of Pauillac itself. Château Pichon Baron has produced a thrilling wine in 2019. It is surely the equal of the wines made here in 2009 and 2010. There is power and purity to the Grand Vin and it has the most fine-grained tannins. It is stunning. There are two additional wines that come from this seventy-three hectare estate, Les Tourelles de Longueville, which traditionally is Merlot dominant, and the new Les Griffons de Pichon Baron, more evenly split between Cabernet and Merlot. They represent twenty-eight and twenty-three percent respectively of the estate’s production. Both look very promising in 2019. Château Pibran is the other property AXA Millésimes own in Pauillac. It has produced a wonderfully fresh and appetizing wine which should be on everyone’s radar given the price.

The Grand Cercle sent half a dozen wines from its members in the Graves region from 2019 vintage. The Graves is an excellent district to find good value Bordeaux and this is evidently true in 2019 which is clearly a successful vintage here. Since the creation of the Pessac-Léognan appellation in 1987 the Graves appellation faded into the background a little, as all the region’s historic and well-followed properties were decanted off into the new appellation. I’m most familiar with the Château Rahoul, Château Ferrande and Château de Chantegrive in this district, all members of the Union des Grand Crus, as well as Clos Floridene through the UK’s Wine Society. Château Brondelle, Château Crabitey, Grand Enclos du Château de Cérons and Château Haura were new to me. I have also included notes on Le Prélat de Pape Clément from Bernard Magrez and Château d’Uza, sent by Jean-Luc Thunevin.

This year one of the opportunities of having samples sent to you is the extra time you can spend tasting them. There are benefits. Rocking up to a château, tasting for fifteen minutes and speeding off to the next property can get a bit Formula One. The grower spends all year making their wine and you make notes in a few minutes with one eye on the clock to keep on track for the next appointment. In primeurs week what else can you do? You want to taste as much as you can but have a finite time to do it. This year samples have turned up at my front door steadily over a couple of months. Yes, it has taken me longer to work my way through the wines and come to an overview this way. There is also a risk that samples won’t be as impressive as when tasted in situ, and there is the chance of spoilage in transport. But being able to taste a wine over a two or three-hour period, I feel confident in the conclusions I am able to draw about the individual wines this year, despite not being able to travel to Bordeaux. Zoom and other video conferencing have allowed winemakers to fill in the gaps in a less hurried way, too.