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in the general admiration without bothering to explain my methods—but now the secret can finally be revealed. I knew my hostess generally drank first-growth Bordeaux and I knew she knew her vintages. But I was very lucky that the wine was Haut-Brion—the most aromatically distinctive and unmistakable of all the first growths; as the great English diarist and bad speller Samuel Pepys put it, in the first brand-name reference to a wine in English literature, “Ho-Bryan … hath a good and most perticular taste that I never met with before.” To be more specific, a mature Haut-Brion smells like a cigar box containing a Montecristo, a black truffle, and a hot brick, sitting on top of an old saddle. It’s as earthy and complex as a Shakespearean sonnet. Once you’ve had it you never forget it, and you never stop yearning for more.

In the seventeenth century owner Araud III de Pontac created the first Bordeaux brand, refining winemaking techniques and sending his son to London to tout the product; Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Jefferson were among its early, vocal fans. Contemporary advocates include the Wachowski brothers—the 1959 Haut-Brion makes a cameo appearance in The Matrix Reloaded.

In 1855 Haut-Brion was officially listed as one of the four first growths of Bordeaux. In 1935, after a long period of decline, the property was purchased by American banker Clarence Dillon and has remained in the Dillon family ever since.

When I had lunch at the restored sixteenth-century château this past spring with Clarence’s granddaughter, Joan, the Duchess of Mouchy, I asked about the legend that Dillon had not even bothered to get off the train in Bordeaux in order to see the property before he purchased it. “That’s absurd,” she said. “He looked at several properties, including Haut-Brion. He was in the middle of the Atlantic on his way home when he got a telegram from his agent saying that Haut-Brion was still available but he would have to act fast. He sent a two-word reply: act fast.”

Dillon, who spent some of her formative years in Paris when her father was the American ambassador and was formerly married to the Prince of Luxembourg, has a voice evocative of a privileged transatlantic upbringing, as deep and burnished as an old Vuitton steamer trunk. She also has a cache of anecdotes that would have made Truman Capote wild with jealousy—unfortunately, she’s probably far too well brought up to write a memoir. Since 1975 she has run the estate with the aid of Jean Delmas, the most respected wine-maker in Bordeaux, who inherited the régisseur duties from his father, George, and claims to have been born “in a vat” on the estate.

The continuity of the Haut-Brion tradition is clearly a sacred duty to the stately, impeccably tailored Delmas, whose son Jean-Philippe seems poised to succeed him, though, like Arnaud de Pontac, he has pioneered many innovations, being among the first to employ stainless-steel fermentation tanks and green harvesting—the pruning of excess grape bunches to ensure concentration. He maintains an experimental garden of some 350 vine clones out behind the château; they are vinified and tested, and the results charted by computer. He tried to explain the process to me, but I got dizzy just looking at the charts.

For centuries, connoisseurs like John Locke, Jefferson, and McInerney have made the pilgrimage to this holy ground in the Graves region, just south of the city of Bordeaux, to examine the sandy glacial soils, full of gravel, which range in color from ash white to espresso brown; today, the vineyards are hemmed in on all sides by the dreary suburban sprawl of the town of Pessac. But the wine retains its subtle, inimitable, lonely majesty.

Haut-Brion’s elegant, supple house style is, in my opinion, often undervalued by wine critics, vis-à-vis the more masculine wines of the Médoc (and its former rival and next-door neighbor La Mission–Haut-Brion, which was bought by the Dillon family in 1983). For all its earthiness, Haut-Brion has always been more about nuance than power. (The 100-point Parker-rated