1990 Château Pichon Baron
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The 1990 Château Pichon-Longueville Baron is drinking at full maturity, where it's been for the past decade, and as a side note, this has been an incredibly consistent wine for me, with every bottle delivering the goods. A gorgeous, majestic Pauillac in every way, it offers utterly classic aromatics of darker currants, leafy tobacco, smoke, truffly earth, and lead pencil. These all carry to a medium to full-bodied effort that has a layered, elegant mouthfeel, resolved tannins, beautiful overall balance, and a great finish. In the same league as the all-time greats here, including the 2000, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2019, ad 2020, it's an incredible treat to drink today. There's no upside to additional cellaring, but it should easily hold for another decade and have a gradual decline thereafter.
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More reviews and scores
Beautifully rich, enticing, soft tannins, a lovely old Paullac that you can sink into. Love this wine, shows plenty of structure but zero hard edges. The fruits are mellow at this point, fig, wild strawberry, leather and undergrowth. A huge yield by modern standards of 70hl/h, and at the time at least 70% would have gone into the 1st wine (but Pichon Baron was smaller at the time, and the vast majority of this wine would have come from the same deep gravel terrace that the 1st wine comes from today).
The 1990 Pichon-Baron is a sensational wine that must have had the First Growth rattled when it was released. At 28 years old, it is still reveling in its precocious growing season. The multidimensional bouquet features blackberry, graphite, cedar and mint flanked by iodine and warm gravel on a summer day. Wow! The palate is medium-bodied, delivering a mixture of red and black fruit, a fine mineral undercurrent and a long, precise finish: blackberry, cedar and graphite remain in the mouth for a good 60 seconds. Still a fabulous Pauillac after all these years. Tasted at the Pichon-Baron vertical at the château. (NM)
About the producer
Pauillac’s Ch. Pichon Baron, formerly known as Ch. Pichon-Longueville Baron, is ranked as one of the 15 Second Growths from the 1855 Classification and is considered one of the "Super Seconds".