Every winter the Union des Grands Crus, an association of all the top Bordeaux producers except the five First Growths, brings its road show to New York. It is one of the few walk-around tastings I attend as even today Bordeaux is still the most important serious wine region in the world.

This year they were showing their 2008’s. It was a cool vintage with much of the wine tasting unripe to me though a handful of minor properties produced delightful wines for early drinking and a few major chateaux excelled.

My favorite, this week’s Five Star Nick’s Wine of the Week, was the Pichon-Longueville Baron 2008 ($90). Baron long languished in the shadow of it’s more pricy sister, Pichon-Longueville Lalande  – these two magnificent rivals face each other across the D2 road like glaring dowagers – but thanks to major investment by its owner, the AXA insurance company, Baron has recently been going from strength to strength, and the 2008 was the star of the show. It glows with gorgeous, juicy berry  flavors, and is blessed with soft, ripe tannins and an elegant, polished structure. The key word here is balance.

Baron has been managed since 2000 by fellow Brit Christian Seely, and I queried him about how Baron was able to make such a spectacular wine when so many of its fellow Bordelaise were stumbling.

The secret, apparently, lies in yields. Seely explains that “At Pichon we’ve been working for the last ten years on pretty low yields – between 35 and 40 hectoliters (per hectare) in order to be absolutely sure of getting the Cabernets ripe.”

“The heart of Pichon’s vineyard is a 35 hectare parcel of very old vines of Cabernet on deep beds of gravel. It’s now giving pretty low yields, about 30 hectoliters in 2008, and when you’ve got old vines working on low yields the grapes get riper in given conditions. If we pushed the yields up to the kind of yields people tried to do 10, 20 years ago we wouldn’t have got the Cabernets so perfectly ripe.”

So one can make a lot of mediocre wine, and hope to sell it on name alone, or make a smaller quantity of very good wine. I am certainly happy Seely took Pichon-Longueville Baron down the latter, less well traveled road in the difficult 2008 vintage.

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