Château Pavie Macquin 2013

The 2013 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 76/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: Coulure decimated the merlots and the rain did the rest: a light vintage, where the gap between terroirs is wider than usual.

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.

Blend of the 2013 vintage

Figures from the 2013 sheet

• 25 hl/haYield
• 35 yrsVine age

Winemaking

Improved grape reception: 4 successive sorting tables, destemming but no crushing. Gravity vatting of whole berries and separate vinification in wooden (40%) and concrete tanks. Alcoholic fermentation with indigenous yeasts. Gentle extraction by punching down the cap, at the core of fermentation, in all tanks. Malolactic fermentation in barrels. Reductive ageing on fine lees: first racking after 6 to 10 months of ageing (before summer), the second one a year later, before bottling. Fining and filtering only if necessary.

Ageing

16-20 months in barrels, 60% 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.