Our favorite scene in "Tampopo," Juzo Itami's 1985 cult film about gastronomic excess, begins with two bums finding an expensive-looking bottle behind a Shinjuku hotel with a bit of wine left in the bottom. They deliver it to a compatriot, a sommelier who'd apparently seen better days but still has sharp taste buds. He declares it to be the '80 Pichon-Longueville and waxes lyrical about the sublime taste of the wine. This astounded the blue-tarp crowd and sent us on a quest for the same bottle ourselves.
Still in our fledgling Bordeaux days, we naively asked at the wine shop for the "80 Pichon," to which we received the puzzling response, "Do you mean the 80 Pichon-Longueville-Baron or the 80 Pichon-Longueville-Comtesse-de-Lalande?" At this point we grabbed a bottle of the more succinctly named Cha^teau Talbot and fled for the door.
Over the years, we've found that most Bordeaux fans use the shorthand notation of Pichon-Baron and Pichon-Lalande to distinguish the two estates, which are literally across the road from each other in the appellation of Pauillac, the region that many refer to as the heart of Bordeaux (three of the five First Growths are located here).
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