1989 Pichon-Lalande, Pauillac

It has been five years since I last drank a bottle of the 1989 Château Pichon-Lalande and the wine has continued to blossom beautifully and is now well into its plateau of peak maturity. Back in this era, the cépages of Pichon-Lalande still included forty percent merlot, which often gives this wine a slightly Right Bank strain of personality and added complexity as a result. The bouquet is flat out stunning today, soaring from the glass in a blend of sweet cassis, dark berries, tobacco leaf, gravelly soil tones, a touch of mint, cigar smoke and a very elegant framing of toasty oak. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, pure, velvety and complex, with a beautiful core of fruit, fine soil signature, melted tannins, very precise balance and great focus and grip on the very long and complex finish. This is a brilliant vintage of Pichon-Lalande drinking at the top of its game at the moment, but still with a half century of potential positive evolution in bottle still laid out before it.

This has entered its secondary phase, with alluring notes of black tea, steeped plum, mulled spice and warm pain d'épices emerging from the core of supple plum, cassis and black cherry fruit. The long, fine-grained finish lets a perfumy singed cedar accent linger. A beauty. (JM)