Château Pavie Macquin 2017

The 2017 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 87/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: Frost struck the slope-foot vines: the plateaus saved the day, and the vintage must be judged plot by plot.

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.

The vintage

2017, from worry to relief

The 2017 vintage will remain in collective memory associated with the devastating spring frosts. Located higher on the Saint-Emilion plateau, the Pavie Macquin vineyard was among the happy few that remained unscathed. The story of the vintage began with the dry summer of 2016, followed by a dry autumn and a mild winter. The brief warm spell at the beginning of spring brought about an early, frank and even budburst. When the cold peak arrived, the vines were gripped but continued to grow slowly. The rest of the growth followed at an ideal pace, calmly. May and June, both warm and dry, offered flowering and fruit set under excellent conditions, which further accentuated the precocity of the vintage. The summer was dry, without heat peaks. After a rainy spell in September, the conditions were right for a precise, sequenced harvest, as gourmand as it was serene. The juice was fresh, of lovely concentration, with tannins of formidable finesse.

Blend of the 2017 vintage

Figures from the 2017 sheet

• 42 hl/haYield
• 35 yrsVine age
• 50,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Manual harvests. Gravity vatting of whole berries and separate vinification in wooden and concrete tanks. Reductive ageing on fine lees: first racking after 6 to 10 months of ageing, 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.