1989 Château Pichon Baron

This is glossy and sophisticated, with so much graphite, ink, pencil shavings, blackberries, blackcurrants and blackberry leaves on the nose. Classy and powerful with very sleek tannins. Dark chocolate and blackcurrants. So long and deep. Drink or hold.

A hot dry vintage that at over 30 years old is really beginning to be sorted out into the great and the 'drink up' wines. This is one to look out for, welcoming aromatics of smoked earth, rosebud and liqorice root, great complexity of flavours, waves of tobacco and brambled blackberry and raspberry puree. Still plenty of fruit here, although tertiary and unfussy. Exotic spices also of cinammon and turmeric. Lovely - you can see why Jean Marie Matignon calls this his first great vintage, five years after he took over as technical director, and it just sings of Pauillac restrained power. Yields up at 55-60hl/h.

One of the wines of the vintage, the 1989 Pichon-Longueville Baron is drinking beautifully today. Bursting from the glass with aromas of ripe blackcurrants, plums, Cuban cigar, loamy soil, black truffles and burning embers, it's medium to full-bodied, rich and enveloping, with powdery tannins and a concentrated core of fruit. Fleshy and dramatic, with a sumptuous, low-acid profile and a long, expansive finish, to my palate this is the one 1989 Pauillac that, on a good day, can rival the extraordinary 1989 Lynch Bages. While I tend to think it's at its peak, every bottle I open from my cellar in Beaune seems to be better than the last.