Château Pavie Macquin 2011

The 2011 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 86/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A warm spring followed by a wet summer gave classic wines, best drunk relatively young.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Saint-Émilion. An estate can depart from it sharply, in frost or hail years, where two neighbours did not make the same vintage. What this particular wine actually gave is on its technical sheet and in the scores above.

Tasting

The wine develops a great deal of substance and power together with great freshness. Without frills, it is clean and well defined, and the balance is well respected.

Blend of the 2011 vintage

Figures from the 2011 sheet

• 14 % vol.Alcohol
• 22 hl/haYield
• 35 yrsVine age
• 50,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Running off is done into barrel, using about 80% new oak depending on the vintage. No calendar dictates the interventions or rackings: every intervention is decided by tasting. Observation from the plot allows different cuvées with a strong identity to be made. They can therefore receive an ageing suited to their character, always with minimal intervention, so as to favour the fruit and to use new oak in a structuring rather than flavouring way. The final blend is thus made only once each lot has reached full maturity.

Ageing

16-20 months in barrels, 50% new

Terroir

The terroir is a plateau, next to the Mondot hill and along the edge of the Fongaban fault. The vineyard has a dominant elevation, ranging from 100 metres at the edge of the hill to seventy-five metres at the rim of the plateau. The soils, all clay-limestone, express different notions of terroir in the vineyard depending on their geographical position, the nature of the clays (stronger or less strong), but also and above all on the proximity of the asteriated limestone bedrock, found between 20 cm and 1.5 m deep. The shallow depth of the soils over a large part of Pavie Macquin allows it to express mineral character.