Château Pavie Macquin 2021

The 2021 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 85/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: Frost followed by a cool summer brought back classic wines, lighter and more taut, to be drunk in their youth.

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

The plateau terroirs brought out the best of 2021. The mildness of summer does not take anything away from the complexity of the soils and offers us a lot of delicacy and balance.

Blend of the 2021 vintage

Figures from the 2021 sheet

• 13.5 % vol.Alcohol
• 37 hl/haYield
• 35 yrsVine age
• 55,200 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Manual harvests. Gravity vatting of whole berries and separate vinification in 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.