Château Pavie Macquin 2019

The 2019 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 95/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A hot end of summer on rehydrated soils gave a rare balance between freshness and substance.

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

2019, or how to do something new while revisiting the classics: a vintage of seasons and contrasts.

The winter of 2019 bore the image of the year: a see-saw. January was cold, the warmth was upon us from February until March, which provoked a prompt and early budburst. April was very cold, with the threat of frost. This coolness continued all spring. With heavy rainfall at the beginning of June, the flowering was of mixed success. Summer arrived on June 21st, punctual and radiant. July was resplendent, sometimes with heatwave conditions, and ended with a decent thunderstorm. The return of water permitted veraison to get under way promptly. Even though August was slightly hot during the day, it was cool at night and we witnessed a record thermal amplitude between daytime and nocturnal temperatures, which is favourable to fine aromatic complexity.

On September 22nd, the clouds and rain appeared. Our grapes, at extreme concentrations, regained a little turgidity, the skins thinned, the pulp and aromas became more defined. A fine oceanic autumn set in just as the harvest began. Radiant, the profile of the wines was marked by cool end-of-season conditions, with expressive, aromatic musts and a particularly high tannin and anthocyanin potential.

Blend of the 2019 vintage

Figures from the 2019 sheet

• 14.5 % vol.Alcohol
• 47 hl/haYield
• 35 yrsVine age
• 66,000 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, 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.