Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande

The story begins with Pierre de Mazure de Rauzan, a Bordeaux merchant with an unusual instinct for gravel, who founded the property in 1689. Five years later, his daughter Thérèse married Jacques de Pichon Longueville, and the land went with her as dowry. The Rauzan name remained in Margaux; in Pauillac it became Pichon. Much of the eighteenth century here was managed by women – Thérèse, then Germaine de Lajus, then Marie Branda de Terrefort.

Baron Joseph de Pichon Longueville took over from his mother at nineteen, died at eighty-nine, and expanded the property to some fifty hectares. In 1850 he divided it among his five children: three-fifths to his daughters and two-fifths to his sons. The Médoc has never quite recovered from that will. The daughters’ share passed to Virginie, wife of Count Henri de Lalande, who gave the estate its name, commissioned the neoclassical château, and ran the vineyard seriously. The 1855 classification ranked the wine a second growth – a status earned by Baron Joseph’s undivided estate and inherited intact by both halves.

In 1925, Edouard and Louis Miailhe bought the property and increased its Merlot plantings, defining the wine for three generations. Edouard’s daughter, May-Eliane de Lencquesaing, took control in 1978, more than doubled the vineyard to eighty-nine hectares, traveled tirelessly, and presided over the legendary 1982. When the next generation did not share her passion, she sold in 2007 to the Rouzaud family, descendants of Louis Roederer – only the third family to hold this land in more than three centuries.

Gorgeous wines were forged in the years that followed; the 2008, 2009 and 2010 trio are standouts. Nicolas Glumineau, appointed general manager and winemaker in 2012, arrived unusually well equipped for a renewal founded on science and sensibility. After a stint in the army, he studied wine under Denis Dubourdieu, pursued opera singing alongside enology, and earned a master’s degree in enology genetics. His career took him from Haut-Brion to Margaux and then Montrose. At a Pichon Lalande dinner some years ago, he ended the evening singing Italian opera. He is an accomplished baritone – a genuine Renaissance man in a region often governed by productive monomania.

“2013 was my first full vintage here,” he told me during the 2022 harvest as we tasted every vintage since 2000. “Imagine! The yield was one-fifth of normal production, and the wine was 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. Sometimes it’s the toughest vintages that…” He stopped with a broad smile. “Well, what do you think of this 2013?” After my noncommittal nod, he pointed to a wine made before he arrived. “I love the 2008.” Beginning with the maligned 2013 was a mixed blessing, but the difficulty provided an unflattering first study of the estate, with every weakness exposed.

Roederer supplied what the renewal required: patience, a new cellar, and the means to look closely. A comprehensive soil survey dug pits nearly two meters deep and examined the soil layer by layer. The broad result was unsurprising: fine, sharply draining Garonne gravel over clay and sandy-clay subsoils. Classic Cabernet country, dry enough to curb vegetative growth early and direct the vine toward ripening fruit.

The revelation was the clay’s precise distribution. Its veins create water regimes exceptionally well suited to Merlot – the geological basis for the variety’s improbable place in a Pauillac legend. The map did not say to abandon Merlot; it showed where Merlot belonged, in far fewer places than it had occupied. This was Renaissance thinking applied to a vineyard: observation before doctrine, an old inheritance reconsidered through new instruments. Since 2012, three to four hectares a year have been uprooted, rested, and replanted with varieties and rootstocks matched to the soil. Cabernet Sauvignon has risen from around half the vineyard toward 75%; Merlot has fallen from about 40% toward the high teens.

The estate has 102 hectares under vine in more than one hundred plots, roughly ninety-two in production. The Gironde estuary’s vast thermal mass moderates temperatures at both ends of the season. In April 2017, it largely spared these vines when frost devastated much of Bordeaux; in a warming climate, it is also a reservoir of freshness. At the southern boundary, part of the vineyard lies physically within Saint-Julien, beside Léoville Las Cases and Léoville Poyferré, yet is entitled to Pauillac through historical delimitation. Anyone who has wondered why Pichon Comtesse can carry Saint-Julien fragrance alongside Pauillac depth has part of the answer there, in the dirt.

Farming has changed just as comprehensively. Hedgerows and trees have returned; beehives have been installed; biodynamic practices have begun on replanted parcels; and in 2021 the entire vineyard entered organic conversion. It is now farmed organically throughout, with biodynamic preparations across most plots. The purpose is not nostalgia but the restoration of complexity and resilience to the living system on which precision depends.

Architect Philippe Ducos’s winery, built in stone, wood, and glass, conceals a three-tiered, gravity-fed cellar used since 2013. Thermoregulated vats in various capacities allow eighty to ninety lots to remain separate each year. The Grand Vin spends about eighteen months in barrel, generally 60% to 65% new. Like the soil map, the cellar is an instrument for seeing differences clearly: parcel, soil, and variety retain their voices until assembly.

But philosophy matters more than plumbing. “You can’t play a game with power and then try to get rid of it,” Glumineau said. Heavy extraction has never been the house method, and under him it has become even gentler: fewer pump-overs early in fermentation, followed by something closer to infusion. “You have to be sharp and precise with the tannins from the outset to bring out the complexity. We will have the finesse if we let it come. The further you go, the more floral you get.” Power is not eliminated but disciplined – anatomy placed in the service of expression.

The second wine was not offered publicly until 1973. From 2017, it was renamed Pichon Comtesse Réserve, placing the estate first. In years when the Grand Vin is overwhelmingly Cabernet, the Réserve absorbs much of the Merlot – sometimes approaching half the crop – preserving another register of the property’s historical voice.

Then there is the white. During the 2022 harvest, Glumineau invited me to guess its varieties. I could not. “It will be Chardonnay and Savagnin. I first thought of Chenin, but we don’t have the chalk to make an elegant Chenin. So I thought of the dry, blended wines of Jura.” Planted on the west side of Pauillac and labeled vin de table, Pichon Comtesse Blanc is vinified in glass amphorae without skin contact and rests seven months on fine lees. The first crop yielded barely a few hundred bottles. An experiment, he insisted – and perhaps the most Renaissance gesture of all: curiosity given a small plot, then tested against nature rather than forced into tradition.

While the forthcoming Pichon Comtesse Blanc (not yet finalized or released) may be radical, recent vintages of the Grand Vin reveal classic Pichon Comtesse with a glow-up.

“I think 2019 and 2020 are a real step up,” Glumineau said. “For my personal taste, I prefer 2020.” The 2022 vintage showed how closely that progress depended on the work in both vineyard and cellar.

“In Pauillac in 2022, we had this feeling we would make our first Napa wine in Bordeaux, but we did not,” he said. “I think everything we have applied in terms of cover crops and biodynamics helped the vines to find balance. We picked from the 6th of September until the 27th of September. Our yields were 30 hl/ha.”

The restraint he advocates became decisive during fermentation. “In the cellar, as soon as we got 10% alcohol, we decreased the extraction—the number of pump-overs. From the beginning, we had everything in hand to make a monster wine, so let’s avoid it.”

For Glumineau, the result gave this Renaissance its clearest expression yet. “I’m really happy with the wine, on top of the fact that we are surprised. The wine is very fine, ethereal, very Pauillac, very Comtesse. I think we have our benchmark now in terms of style; it is 2022.”

That search for balance continued in 2025. Harvest began on August 28, the earliest start in the estate’s memory, and ended on September 23. A historic drought followed the wet 2024, whose water stored in revitalized subsoils proved crucial. Yields were tiny – about thirty hectoliters per hectare for Merlot and twenty for Cabernet – while average alcohol after fermentation was 13.4%. Roughly half the crop entered the Grand Vin, with Cabernet Sauvignon around 81%, a blend almost unthinkable here in 1990.

 

Louis Roederer marks its 250th anniversary in 2026 and remains family-controlled. This is important for the estate’s future. A group thinking in generations can remove hectares from production, rebuild soil life and wait for young vines, even when the market prefers volume. This Renaissance has depended on time as much as money: the freedom to observe, revise and begin again.

The risk in a project this thorough is that precision arrives and personality leaves – that correcting a century of Merlot plantings sands away what made people love the wine. So far, the opposite has happened. Recent vintages have gained Pauillac authority without losing the Comtesse’s perfume, suppleness and emotional immediacy. This is less a new style than a clearer grammar for an old one.

I was packing up my laptop when I asked whether Glumineau plays music while blending. “Of course. Mainly, it’s Radiohead and Kate Bush. Radiohead can be strong, but it’s in the air. It’s in the wine. Kate Bush – early Kate Bush – and Radiohead are Pichon Comtesse. And maybe Bowie. But the tannins, in particular, are Radiohead.” It was a fittingly synesthetic answer from a man who treats blending as composition: structure and perfume, tension and release, old themes made newly audible.

Virginie de Pichon Longueville sat for her portrait in 1858 against a gray ground, wearing a black shawl with pale roses and a melancholy she made no effort to disguise. She spent her life trying to make an unforgettable wine from a fraction of the land into which she had been born. More than a century and a half later, the estate bearing her name has returned to first principles: close study of nature, faith in craft and the conviction that science and art sharpen one another. It has taken a Champagne family, a geologist’s trowel and a baritone’s ear to continue her sentence. The result is not a restored monument, fixed in former glory, but a living work – recognizably Pichon Comtesse, and more completely itself.