Château Pichon-Baron: Vineyards
The vineyards are for the main part concentrated on the left-hand side of the D2 as it courses through Pauillac, and thus the estate faces Château Pichon-Lalande on the other side of the road, and behind that lies Château Latour. These are, it should go without saying, illustrious neighbours, and it clearly indicates we are in a real sweet-spot for the Pauillac appellation here. All told the estate accounts for 88 hectares of the appellation, and of this 73 hectares are committed to vines.
The main part, as already explained, is the historic heart of the estate which surrounds the grand château. Here there are 40 hectares of vines, approximately 60% of the entire estate, on the deep gravel that typifies the best terroirs of the Médoc. The gravel is deep, several metres in places, cut with lenses of clay and gravel, as is the case for all of these gravel mounds. Deeper, there is clay, and should you be able to dig deep enough you would no doubt eventually encounter the limestone bedrock of Bordeaux which only tends to come to the surface in large areas on the right bank. It is the gravel that makes Château Pichon-Baron what it is though.
