Bordeaux 2016 Primeurs: Pauillac
The tasting room at Château Pichon-Baron had emptied, save for me and a handful of others, most of whom were employees. It was my last appointment before the lunch bell rang, and it was clear all the other tasters had stopped beavering away over their notebooks and laptops and had left for the on-site restaurant. I hadn’t planned on taking lunch here, or indeed anywhere, but I realised I had forty minutes to spare before my next appointment which was at Château Mouton-Rothschild, a mere two minutes away. So it was a toss-a-coin situation. Heads, and I would head back to my hire car, and the gently festering sandwich of sweaty Emmental and stale baguette which waited for me there. Tails, and I would head to the dining room, for a swift three-course lunch of smoked salmon, guinea fowl with girolles, and cheese.
Five minutes later I took my seat at a table just across from Christian Seely. It had taken four tosses of the coin before it had the decency to give me the right answer, but I got there in the end. The service was super swift, and all three courses were done in the space of thirty minutes, so thanks to the team here for running it so efficiently. As I started tucking in, just beyond my dinner plate, four glasses were filled with four vintages of Pichon-Baron.
“What we’re doing”, Christian told us (although as I had arrived well behind the other ten people seated around the table, and I could see more than a few partly-drained glasses, I think this was just for my benefit), “is tasting four vintages of Pichon-Baron. They’re 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003, all poured blind. When I have everybody’s answers we will see who got them right, and who got them wrong”. Now I am a fan of blind tasting from bottle (but not from barrel), even if I do get them wrong much more often than I get them right. But as I have written before I am not a fan of the popular primeurs activity of lunchtime drinking followed by getting behind the wheel, so I set about seeing what I could perceive from colour, from aroma, and from the tiniest of tasting-sips.
