CONTENTS

Château Pichon Comtesse and Château Pichon Baron were both once part of a larger estate. We compare these two wines, through their 2008 vintage, examining their common heritage, their taste, history, and evolution.

Bordeaux’s rise to the status of an iconic wine region was a slow process that began by piggy-backing on the success of neighbouring regions and then employing restrictive commercial practices against the competition. But it was the popularity of Bordeaux wines among the ruling classes of England and other north European states that cemented its position in European markets. This article describes the beginnings of the Bordeaux wine trade, and its connection to dynasties, politics and wealth in the Middle Ages.

Using a simple formula of a wine’s score and its price it’s easy to pick out the wines which represent value for money in this Bordeaux 2011 vintage.

A number of Bordeaux’s so-called ‘second wines’ fail to live up to their billing: often too inconsistent even to dignify the name of their Appellations, frequently too dry to encourage their purchase, to cellar let alone to drink. These ‘second wines’ are a kind of subsidiary market destined for consumers who know little about wine but who are reassured by buying a wine associated with a known label.

With 60 Appellations (AOC) and more than 100,000 hectares of vines, the region of the Gironde (which includes Bordeaux) is the largest wine region in France. The Gironde estuary dominates the whole region affecting the climate, terroir and therefore its vintages. Much of the land occupied along the rivers – particularly the Gironde – are classified estates (under the 1855 Classification). The author, Catherine Taverny, and Simon, retired commercial fisherman and winemaker, take a trip on the estuary and discuss its future.

Do you believe that people are capable of holding Christian values who aren’t Christians, any more than a bottle of sparkling wine from Australia can be Champagne? Whilst some do not believe God exists, they do think the Ten Commandments offer a pretty decent road map for social harmony. We are all flawed, but we are all capable of redemption by how we behave, not by doing things we think a “creator” might like enough to give us a pass into Paradise.

Some wines are good, some are bad, and within both groups some are better than others. These facts are not fixed by one’s subjective experience, nor by one’s judgment. One may judge inferior a wine one nevertheless enjoys, as one may be moved by what one recognizes to be bad literature. One may judge inferior a wine that is superior; wines are misjudged. If quality were simply a function of one’s reactions, a fact only about oneself, the ritual would make no more sense than the Latin Mass without belief in God. That is, it wouldn’t make sense intellectually. It could still be performed for ancillary purposes; it could be a game.