Someone brings a bottle to dinner in Wan Chai, the label says Pichon, and half the table assumes they know what is in the glass. They usually do not. There are two Pichons in Pauillac. They are separate companies with separate owners and separate vineyards, and in any vintage the gap between them can run to several hundred dollars a bottle. Ordering the wrong one is not a catastrophe. Not knowing there are two is how people end up paying for a surname instead of a wine.
The split happened in 1850, when a single family holding was divided between heirs. One part went down the male line, the other to a daughter married into the Lalande family. Both halves kept the founding name. Today one is Pichon Baron and the other is Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, usually shortened to Pichon Comtesse. They sit near each other at the southern end of Pauillac. They are not the same wine, they are not made by the same people, and only one of them makes Les Griffons.
What a second wine is actually for
A second wine usually gets explained as whatever the estate could not fit into the grand vin. That is not what it is, and believing it costs people money in both directions. It makes them dismiss a genuinely good bottle as scraps, and it makes them assume the expensive one must be the better drink tonight.
The leftovers picture assumes a single sequence: pick everything, ferment everything, taste it all at the end, keep the good barrels and dump the rest under a cheaper label. Estates at this level do not work that way. The vineyard is mapped parcel by parcel, with vine age, soil depth and drainage recorded for each block. Long before harvest, the estate already knows roughly which parcels are pointing at which wine. Those parcels get picked separately, fermented in separate vats, and raised in different proportions of new oak. The second wine has its own recipe, not a consolation prize.
Some of the blending is genuinely decided late, and in a difficult year a great deal more fruit gets pushed down into the second label. But the starting point is a design decision rather than a rejection. A second wine is what an estate makes when it wants a wine that drinks earlier, costs less, and still tastes of the same ground.
Pichon Baron, and the wine that belongs to it
Pichon Baron sits on gravel that runs straight into Latour's, which is about as good an address as Pauillac has to offer. It has been owned since 1987 by the wine division of a French insurance group, and that ownership matters to this story: it paid for a long, unglamorous programme of replanting and plot-by-plot mapping. That work is exactly what makes a considered second wine possible in the first place.
Les Griffons de Pichon Baron is that wine. It leans on younger vines and on parcels further from the estate's old Cabernet Sauvignon core, and it carries a larger share of Merlot in most years. Less new oak, softer tannins sooner. It is recognisably from the same place, with the same graphite-edged blackcurrant register and the same firm finish, but it becomes drinkable something like a decade earlier.
Les Griffons belongs to Pichon Baron, not to Pichon Comtesse. We stock both estates, and they are filed separately. Comtesse has its own second label sold under the Pichon Comtesse Réserve name, which is a different wine off different soil. If someone tells you Les Griffons is the second wine of Pichon Lalande, they have merged two businesses that were separated before Hong Kong had a railway.
What we have
Our Pichon Baron listing holds the grand vin and Les Griffons together, sorted from the least expensive bottle upwards, and it reads best as a ladder with three rungs rather than a price list.
The bottom rung is mature Les Griffons. The 2013 sits in the mid three hundreds and has already had a decade in bottle, which is the part most people undervalue: you are buying time that someone else has paid to store. The middle rung is recent Les Griffons. The 2017 and the 2018 both sit around four hundred and are still tightening rather than opening out. The top rung is the grand vin, which starts near thirteen hundred with the 2012 and climbs through the 2014 and the 2018.
The jump from rung two to rung three is roughly threefold. That is the number to keep in your head for the rest of this.
What we would pick, and why
Les Griffons 2013, for almost everybody. The 2013 vintage was cool and difficult in Bordeaux, which is precisely why this bottle works. In a hard year an estate declassifies aggressively, so proportionally more of the careful fruit ends up in the second label, and the wine that results is lighter and earlier-drinking by nature. Ten years on it is doing what it was always going to do, and it costs a quarter of the grand vin. If you want to understand what Pichon Baron tastes like without a lecture on patience, this is the bottle.
Les Griffons 2018, if you want to see the estate stretch. A warm, ripe year gives the second wine more flesh than usual. This is the one that most obviously does not taste like a lesser thing, and it will take three or four more years without complaint. It is also the single best bottle here for a Cantonese banquet, where the food keeps changing and a wine that needs decanting for two hours is a nuisance.
Pichon Baron 2012, if the cellar exists. Not the most celebrated vintage, which is why it is the least expensive route into the grand vin. It is a proper Pauillac with real structure. Buy it only if you can leave it somewhere stable for another five years or more.
Where the extra money stops buying flavour
The honest version: if you live in a Hong Kong flat with no wine fridge, do not buy the grand vin. Summer here runs humid and above thirty degrees, and a bottle in a kitchen cupboard ages fast and badly. Paying thirteen hundred dollars for a wine that needs a decade, then cooking it for two summers, is worse value than buying three bottles of Les Griffons and drinking them. A grand vin bought without storage is not an investment in quality, it is a slow write-off.
The other case for skipping up is simpler. If the bottle is being opened within a week of purchase, the grand vin will show you tannin and reticence, and the second wine will show you fruit. On the night, the cheaper bottle wins. The grand vin is not better on any given evening; it is better later, and only if you actually give it later.
Where the money is genuinely well spent is a gift with a name on it, or a bottle laid down for a specific date some years out. Both are real reasons. Wanting a nicer glass of wine on Saturday is not one.