Did one inheritance split Pichon in two?

In 1849 Pierre Biarnez, a Bordeaux poet who had set the growths of the Médoc in rhyming couplets, gave a page to Pichon-Longueville. The wine, he wrote, stood "facing Latour," elegant and musky "like a man of the court," not quite Rauzan nor Léoville "but itself, Pichon de Longueville."

Then he turned to the owner. He counted 90 winters on his brow and found him "skillful and quick to empty his glass," because every day after dinner "they serve him one of his old flagons, which he empties at dessert."

The old man was Joseph de Pichon-Longueville, and the book went to press in the last year of his life. He died on December 6, 1849, by the regional heritage inventory's record. The following June a deed parted his vineyard among his children, and Pauillac has been telling the story of that deed ever since.

Pauillac tells it as a clean break. One inheritance, 1850, a château for the brother, a château for the sisters, and 2 rival wines facing each other across the road ever after: Baron and Comtesse.

The paper keeps a stranger count. In 1855 the brokers of Bordeaux wrote one Pichon into their classification, and no decree or amendment ever wrote a second. Yet every edition of the trade's directory has printed that classification with 2 Pichons since 1868, and the edition that added the line declared, a page before the table, that it had followed the brokers' document to the letter.

So when did Pichon become two? The deed is the obvious answer, and it is a real deed. This file holds it up against the wine in the vats and the line in the books, in the order they happened.

What the heirs stood to divide

The vineyard the old man left was worth a great deal. William Franck, a Bordeaux broker whose Traité sur les vins du Médoc became the trade's own handbook, printed the sales of the 1844 vintage by name. The line for Saint-Lambert reads "Latour, 3,000; Pichon-Longueville, 2,700." One estate, one line, 90% of a first growth's price, 5 years before the deed.

His table of 5 vintages from 1833 to 1840 has Pichon-Longueville making more wine than Latour in its 1833 column, 150 tonneaux against 100 (the Bordeaux tonneau is 4 barrels, about 900 liters).

Franck had not always rated it so high, a detail the estate's own history does not mention. His first edition, in 1824, put Pichon-Longueville among the third growths, with Corse, Cos-Destournel, Calon, and Lascombe. By his 2nd edition of 1845 he had moved it up. Pauillac and Saint-Lambert, he now wrote, held "two first growths, Lafitte and Latour; two seconds, Mouton and Pichon-Longueville."

That was the inheritance: one vineyard beside Latour under one name, whose 1844 had sold at 90% of its neighbor's price.

The law of division

The deed exists, and the regional heritage inventory has read it. On June 17, 1850, an act of partition of the domaine de la Baderne, an older name for the vineyard, divided the property among Joseph's heirs, 5 of them by Stephen Brook's account. The architects Duphot and Benquet priced the master's house with its dependencies at 64,500 francs, and even the chapel and the tower got figures of their own.

Charles Saint-Amant, a Bordeaux writer walking the Médoc for a general reader in 1855, saw the result from the road. The first 2 buildings a traveler meets, "whether one turns right or left of the high road," belong to the Pichon family. The baron, "not content with the paternal manor," had raised an elegant château on the site of the old house. Across the road stood "a second château, as important, but in less good taste, built for the sisters of M. Pichon."

Saint-Amant blamed the law rather than the family: "On the death of the old baron, who passed away a nonagenarian, his estate, all of one piece, had to submit to the law of division."

The law he meant is the Civil Code's rule of equal shares among children, which parts a vineyard the way it parts a farm. Whether it parts a wine is another question, and the witnesses of 1855 answered it.

Still one wine

Armand d'Armailhacq, a Médoc proprietor who finished a treatise on the vine in the classification year, took the reader along the Bordeaux road past Latour and set the vineyard down: 50 hectares, about 100 tonneaux of very renowned wine, some of the vines lying inside Saint-Julien. The growth, "which was all of one piece, without parcels, is today divided." The baron had kept the old house and built "a very beautiful château" there; 2 of his sisters "have built together a charming modern château, between their brother's and that of Latour."

Then the sentence the legend leaves out:

For the rest, the wine of all the co-owners is made in common, and it has, in consequence, undergone no change; it is still the wine of Pichon-Longueville.

« du reste, le vin de tous les cointéressés se fait en commun, et il n'a, par conséquent, subi aucun changement ; c'est toujours le vin de Pichon-Longueville »

His table puts figures on it: "Pichon de Longueville, divisé: Le baron Albert de Pichon, 2/5, 20 hectares; Les comtesses de Pichon et de Lalande, 2/5, 20; La vicomtesse de Lavaur, 1/5, 10." That is 3 holdings and one classified growth. In the same paragraph he walks on to Léoville, "divided into three portions which enjoy the same favor," each with its own entry. One witness saw 2 divided estates on one road and printed only one of them in pieces.

The handbooks did the same. Franck's 3rd edition of 1853 gives "Léoville, divisé en trois" 3 lines, one for each proprietor with his own tonnage, and prints Gruaud-Larose "divisé entre" its heirs. Pichon de Longueville sits 4 lines below: Saint-Lambert, 100 to 120 tonneaux, one line. Franck knew how to print a divided estate, and he did not print Pichon as one.

Nor did the brokers. In April 1855 the brokers of the Bordeaux exchange, asked by the Chamber of Commerce for a list of the great growths for the exhibition Napoleon III opened in Paris that year, wrote Pichon-Longueville once among the seconds. The proprietor's column reads "Baron de Pichon Longueville."

The same page shows they had a notation for shared estates. Léoville is one entry with 3 proprietors braced beside it, Gruau Laroze one entry with 3, Rauzan one name braced into Ségla and Gassies. Pichon got no brace. The exhibition's jury, reported by Dr. Gaubert in 1857, gave its 2nd-class medal to "M. le baron de Pichon de Longueville, pour son vin de Pichon-Longueville," one man and one wine.

One entry, 3 owners

It stayed one for longer than the legend allows. Thomas George Shaw, a London wine merchant, published Wine, the Vine, and the Cellar in 1863 with an engraving headed "Château Pichon de Longueville" and, under it, 6 of Biarnez's lines from 1849, the man of the court and the petit-maître, the dandy. His table of the second growths gives one entry: "Pichon-Longueville (Pauillac), comtesse Sophie de Pichon, baron de Pichon-Longueville, comtesse de Lalande," followed by one acreage and one production.

An English merchant could, 13 years after the partition, name 3 owners and still count one wine, because that is what the trade sold him.

Alfred Danflou, a Bordeaux publisher photographing the châteaux for a series of monographs, named "M. le baron de Pichon-Longueville and Mme la comtesse de Lalande, co-proprietors of this second great growth," in 1867, 90 to 100 tonneaux between them. He also passed on a taster's verdict, that this was "un vin de petit maître, un vin de dames," a dandy's wine, a ladies' wine, and rebutted it. The word is Biarnez's, from 1849, and it had been used about one wine. Danflou repeated it about a growth that in his own sentence still had one name and 2 owners.

So when did the vats part? The estates' own histories, and the modern trade after them, part the wines around 1860, the sisters' side under Virginie, comtesse de Lalande. The record brackets the date in print: one wine in 1855, 3 owners on one line in 1863, co-proprietors of one growth in 1867.

The line nobody signed

Then Édouard Féret, the Bordeaux publisher who had taken over the guide of the Englishman Charles Cocks, printed its 2nd edition in 1868, and the classification changed without anyone changing it. On page 90, under the heading CLASSIFICATION DES GRANDS VINS ROUGES, he tells the reader what comes next:

For these five categories of great growths, we have followed textually the last official document drawn up by the brokers' syndical chamber in 1855.

« Pour ces cinq catégories de grands crûs, nous avons suivi textuellement le dernier document officiel établi par la Chambre syndicale des courtiers en 1855. »

The table begins on the next page. Its second growths read "Pichon-Longueville. Pichon-Longueville-Lalande," with the baron against the first and the comtesse against the second. The commune pages carry the first separate harvests any book in this library prints: 50 to 60 tonneaux for the Pichon-Longueville side, 30 to 40 for the comtesse de Lalande.

A footnote explains what the table has just done: the Pichon-Longueville growths "have belonged for a very long time to the Pichon-Longueville family. Formerly united, they were known under the name of Batisse." The book adds a line to the 1855 list and tells the reader, in small type, that the 2 things it has just separated used to be one thing.

The 3rd edition of 1874 disagrees with itself. Its classification table, at page 83, prints 2 Pichons among the seconds. Its Pauillac pages, at page 160, print 3: "Ch. de Pichon-Longueville (baron Raoul de Pichon-Longueville) 55. Ch. de Pichon-Longueville (vicomtesse de Lavaur) 30. Château de Pichon-Longueville-Lalande (comtesse de Lalande) 50." The baron is Albert in d'Armailhacq and Raoul in the directories from 1874 on; the modern accounts say the share passed to a cousin of the same name, and this file leaves it there.

The heritage inventory transcribes the footnote in which the guide concedes that "these three parts form, so to speak, only two," the vicomtesse de Lavaur's vines being worked in common with the baron's; our own copy carries only the tail of that sentence. So in one volume, 77 pages apart, the same estate is 2 growths on one page and 3 on another, and the author knows it.

After that the count settles into the pair the world knows, and the figures wander. The English edition of 1883 gives the baron 60 tuns and the comtesse, styled "Mrs Carlos de Lalande," 70, the sisters' half now the larger in print. The supplement of 1901 prints 5 vintages side by side, and the 2 rows differ in every column. By 1920 an anonymous London author writing as G.A.K. gave the 2 châteaux separate sections and opened the first by saying that "they formed originally one estate."

The assurance travels with the table. The 9th edition of 1922 prints the sentence again, adding only the words "whose table stands opposite," and the table opposite prints Pichon-Longueville and Pichon-Longueville-Lalande on consecutive lines. That is 54 years of word-for-word copying, and the word count went up. The same sentence covers the quiet disappearance of the name Dubignon in Case 03; the copy that lost a name there gained one here.

Grégoire Croidieu and Walter W. Powell, organizational sociologists who built a dataset from 6 editions of this guide, wrote in 2024 that "the number of 1855 estates, though fixed, keeps changing as the organizations split, merge, cease, or resurge." They counted 57 at the start and 62 in all up to 1929. Pichon is one of the 5 that the fixed list grew.

What the market made of it

The 2 halves then had a century to become different things. The family sold the baron's side in 1933 to the Bouteillers, and AXA bought it in 1987, with Jean-Michel Cazes running it until 2001 and Christian Seely since. The comtesse's side passed, by Brook's account, to a niece in 1882 and then to the Miailhe family, and in 1978 to May-Eliane de Lencquesaing, who transmitted it in 2007 to the Champagne house Louis Roederer and the Rouzaud family.

What the market did with the 2 names is measurable, and 2 economists measured it. Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh ran 29,911 lots of classified Médoc through 101 Christie's sales from 1980 to 1992 and indexed the classed growths with du Tertre at 100: Lafite 443, Mouton 452, Latour 417, Pichon-Longueville Comtesse 225, Pichon-Longueville Baron 128. One deed, one rank, and the sisters' half priced at nearly double the brother's.

The critics and the economists split them too. Robert Parker, the critic of the age, promoted one half: Olivier Gergaud and Victor Ginsburgh, studying whether terroir mattered, note that "Pichon Lalande, classified as a First-Growth by Parker," had vines averaging 22 years.

Colin Hay, a political economist studying how Bordeaux's futures prices form, found the mirror image in 2007. The trade calls a second growth that sells like a first a super second. "Château Pichon-Baron, a highly regarded 'super second', is the exception," Hay wrote: a wine "which has acquired a consistent reputation for high quality yet a relatively modest release price when compared to that of its peers."

The economics literature then did what the guides had done, and stopped noticing. Orley Ashenfelter, the economist who taught a generation that 1855 was a price ranking, wrote, citing Penning-Rowsell, that "the 1855 classification ranks these chateaux in only a slightly different order: Lafite, Latour, Pichon-Lalande, Cos d'Estournel, and Montrose." The 1855 classification contains no Pichon-Lalande. The line Féret added in 1868 had become, for the economist most associated with the subject, a thing the brokers wrote.

Run the brokers' method again and the twins come back together. When the London exchange Liv-ex sorted the classified growths by their traded prices to build "the classification that would have been drawn up if today's prices were those prevalent 154 years ago," both Pichons came out second growths, together.

Nicolas Glumineau, who has run the Comtesse since the 2012 harvest, put it in Pauillac's own terms when Wine Spectator ranked his 2018 the 2nd wine of its year. "The other horse across the street," he said, "was in front by a head and had been winning the race lately."

The verdict

The claim on trial is that one inheritance split Pichon in two. The deed of June 1850 is real, and the land it parted never rejoined. The wine did not follow: a proprietor in the classification year wrote that it was still made in common, an English merchant in 1863 printed one entry with 3 owners, and the estates themselves date the parting of the vats to about 1860. The list followed later still, and by no act at all: one Pichon in the brokers' document of 1855, 2 in every edition of the directory from 1868, and a publisher's assurance in 1922 that he had copied the original word for word. The legend has the right deed and the wrong dates, about a decade off for the wine and 13 years off for the list.

Mixed. The partition parted the land in 1850. The wine held on for another decade, and the books spent decades more disagreeing on the count. The cause is true; the calendar is false. This court rules on both.

The wine

There are 2 wines now, on either side of the road Saint-Amant walked. Pichon Baron farms 73 hectares for AXA Millésimes, about 40 of them on the original terroir feeding the first wine, with Les Tourelles de Longueville as its second wine and the turreted château of the 1850s as its face. Pichon Comtesse farms 95 hectares for Louis Roederer, 72% cabernet sauvignon, 24 merlot, 3 cabernet franc, and 1 petit verdot, about 150,000 bottles a year, with Pichon Comtesse Réserve as its second wine and a vineyard being converted fully to organic and biodynamic methods. A slice of its vines still lies across the Saint-Julien line, where d'Armailhacq found them in 1855.

The trade press tasting the 2025 vintage this May called them "the two great Pichon 'super-seconds'," rated them the same, and found them "very different but equally captivating." That is the fair summary of a partition deed's work: one plateau, 2 characters, and a rank the books gave to a wine that no longer exists.

There is one place where the split never happened. When climate scientists assembled an open database of grape harvest dates to reconstruct the weather of past centuries, the composite series they built for Bordeaux runs from 1449 to 2006, 558 dates, and the reference series they chose for the whole region is Pichon-Longueville. In the scientific record there is still one Pichon, and it is older than the deed.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 1st edition, Paris, 1816, the second-class growths of Pauillac.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc et les autres vins rouges du département de la Gironde, 1st edition, Bordeaux, 1824, the Saint-Lambert table, the classification, and the table of prices since 1745.
• Cyrus Redding, A History and Description of Modern Wines, London, 1833, the table of the wines of the Gironde.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, the Pauillac chapter, the sales of 1844, and the table of quantities and prices.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, Pauillac and the classification.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, pp. 40 to 41.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, p. 218 and the classification, p. 242.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the table of second growths.
• A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, pp. 188 to 189 and the state of the vineyards of Pauillac.
• Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, Pauillac.
• P. Gaubert, Étude sur les vins et les conserves, suivie du compte rendu de la séance de dégustation tenue par les membres de la 11e classe de l'Exposition universelle, Paris, 1857, the awards.
• Thomas George Shaw, Wine, the Vine, and the Cellar, London, 1863, p. 175 and the table of second growths.
• Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais : monographies et photographies des châteaux et vignobles, 2nd series, Bordeaux, 1867, Château Pichon-Longueville.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, the note on the classification and its table, pp. 89 to 91, and Pauillac, pp. 136 to 138.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1874, the classification table, p. 83, and Pauillac, pp. 160 to 161.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classified in Order of Merit, 2nd English edition, Bordeaux, 1883, pp. 182 to 183.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, Bordeaux, 1886, pp. 188 to 189.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 6th edition, Bordeaux, 1893, p. 205.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 7th edition, Bordeaux, 1898, Pauillac and the table of harvests by growth.
• Édouard Féret, Supplément à la 7e édition de Bordeaux et ses vins, Bordeaux, 1901, the quantities harvested in the classed growths from 1896 to 1900.
• G.A.K., Clarets and Sauternes: Classed Growths of the Médoc and Other Famous Red and White Wines of the Gironde, London, 1920, section XVI, pp. 57 to 60.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, pp. 61 to 62, the official classification and its note.

Modern scholarship and the public record.

• Chambre syndicale des courtiers de commerce près la Bourse de Bordeaux, "Vins rouges classés du département de la Gironde," the tableau annexed to the letter of April 18, 1855, in the copy certified "pour copie conforme" and held by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce, read from photographs of its 5 pages.
• Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel, dossier IA33005642, "Château Pichon Longueville," 2012, for the death of Joseph de Pichon-Longueville, the act of partition of June 17, 1850, and its valuations, and the 1874 concession. patrimoine-nouvelle-aquitaine.fr
• Grégoire Croidieu and Walter W. Powell, "Organizations as Carriers of Status and Class Dynamics: A Historical Ethnography of the Emergence of Bordeaux's Cork Aristocracy," in Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship, 2024, for the 6 Féret panels and the count of 57 and 62.
• Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh, "Des enchères comme révélateurs du classement des vins. Les grands crus du Haut-Médoc," Journal de la Société de statistique de Paris, vol. 137, no. 2, 1996, pp. 19 to 49, the French version of their working paper Pricing Red Wines of Médoc Vintages from 1949 to 1989 at Christie's Auctions, Université Libre de Bruxelles, November 1994, revised April 1995, Table 7. Numdam
• Orley Ashenfelter, "Predicting the Quality and Prices of Bordeaux Wines," The Economic Journal, vol. 118, 2008, read in the working-paper version of 2007, for the ranking sentence.
• Olivier Gergaud and Victor Ginsburgh, "Natural Endowments, Production Technologies and the Quality of Wines in Bordeaux. Is It Possible to Produce Wine on Paved Roads?", working paper, 2007, later in The Economic Journal, vol. 118, 2008, for Parker's classification and the age of the vines.
• Colin Hay, "Globalisation and the Institutional Re-embedding of Markets: The Political Economy of Price Formation in the Bordeaux En Primeur Market," New Political Economy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, notes 20 and 21. doi.org
• V. Daux and others, "An Open-Access Database of Grape Harvest Dates for Climate Research: Data Description and Quality Assessment," Climate of the Past, vol. 8, 2012, pp. 1403 to 1418, Table 1.
• Stephen Brook, The Complete Bordeaux, 4th edition, Mitchell Beazley, London, 2022, pp. 235 to 239, for the successions, the château dates, and the Saint-Julien parcel.

The trade, the critics, and the estates' own accounts.

• Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux, the Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande page, for the owner, the director, the vineyard, the blend, the production, the second wine, and the conversion. ugcb.net
• Jane Anson, "Chateau Longueville au Baron de Pichon-Longueville," Decanter China, producer profile, for the family's sale, the AXA purchase, the directors, the vineyard, and the second wine. decanterchina.com
• "Back in the Race: 17 Vintages of Bordeaux's Pichon Longueville Lalande," Wine Spectator, Top 100 of 2021, for the rank, the cuverie, and the quotation from Nicolas Glumineau. winespectator.com
• The Drinks Business, May 2026, the en primeur report on Pauillac, for the 2025 vintage and the sentence on the 2 Pichons. thedrinksbusiness.com
• Decanter, 2009, the report on the Liv-ex reclassification by traded price, for the method and the quotation from James Miles. decanter.com

How this was checked

Every period quotation was read in the original text, in a private library of 244,000+ wine documents, the oldest from 1373. Where an English edition is quoted its wording is kept, spelling and all; the other translations from the French are mine, with the French beneath the lines that matter most so that you can check one against the other. If a page cited here does not say what I say it says, write to me at antonio@bordeauxreviews.com and I will correct it.

To cite this article: Antonio Assumpção, "Did one inheritance split Pichon in two?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 11/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/did-one-inheritance-split-pichon-in-two/.

Antonio "Guto" Assumpção stands at the intersection of law and wine. Admitted to practice law in Florida, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, he is also a French Wine Scholar and a Master of Bordeaux by the Wine Scholar Guild and holds a WSET Level 3 certification. Antonio has been studying, collecting, and tasting Bordeaux wines for the past 20 years, and his articles blend a detailed analysis with a connoisseur's insight into the world of wine. Follow him on Instagram at @BordeauxReviews.