The wine of the month
Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, 2010
4,5 NJP of 5,0 NJP
November 2022: Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, 2010, red dry blend wine, Pauillac, Haut-Médoc, Médoc, Bordeaux, France, 4,5 NJP of 5,0 NJP (96 points of 100 points) (30-11-2022 by Robert Jonasson and Nenad Jelisic)
The best wine of the year comes this year from Bordeaux and Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac. Vintage 2010 is the best vintage of Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, which Wines We Love has tasted so far, and it is extra fun that the vintage has developed into a Bordeaux wine of the absolute highest class. The wine has an incomparably complex aroma with open dark, full-bodied fruit such as plum, blackcurrant and dark ripe cherry. Add to that freshly roasted coffee, and cedar and tobacco notes. The flavour is nuanced, but at the same time full-bodied, with ripe dark fruit, coffee and cedar. The toasted oak notes have been integrated very well and the tannin structure is delightfully silky. The aftertaste is infinitely long. Although the wine is 12 years old, there are both fruit, acidity and tannins for it to be aged for another 5-10 years. However, there is no major reason to wait as it is already so superb.
The Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande 2010 is a perfect food companion. Enjoy it with a grilled entrecôte, homemade béarnaise sauce and French fries or why not with roast lamb with herbal red wine sauce and potato gratin. Other delicious food combinations with the wine are red wine-braised beef cheeks with truffle potato purée and roast venison with creamy chanterelle sauce, blackcurrant jelly and Hasselback potatoes. To get optimal conditions to enjoy this wine, it should be served at 18-19°C in a Bordeaux glass of better quality. If possible, in glass from Orrefors, Kosta Boda, Spiegelau or Riedel. The wine benefits from being decanted one to two hours before serving.
Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, or Pichon Comtesse as it is often called, is the neighbour of Château Latour, which should ensure good conditions for producing high quality wines. Since 2010, Pichon Comtesse has been working according to biodynamic principles in the vineyards. The property has 102 hectares of vineyards distributed over 100 different vineyard plots. The soil in the vineyards is well-drained and consists mainly of gravel with a subsoil of clay. The grape blend in the vintage 2010 consists of 66% Cabernet Sauvignon, 24% Merlot, 7% Cabernet Franc and 3% Petit Verdot. The grapes for the wine are harvested by hand at optimal ripeness. After very careful selection in both the vineyard and the winery, each vineyard plot is vinified separately. After destemming and crushing, the grape mass, which consists of crushed grapes and grape juice, is macerated/fermented, in stainless steel tanks. For the main wine of Pichon Comtesse, wines from 70 of the vineyard plots are blind tasted. Only those considered to be the best are used in the final blend of the wine. The wine is aged for 18 months in 225 litres French oak barrels (barriques) of which 60% are new. Finally, the wine is bottled and then aged for another 1 to 2 months before it is released in the market
