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Chateau Pavie on a beautiful
late-September day.

Pavie merlot hangs limp
on the plateau above the chateau.
 -- late September 2006.

A sample of Pavie cabernet franc
 taken in front of the chateau.

Here, lively bunches of merlot hang
at Troplong Mondot during
as harvest begins.

Freshly turned earth
at Pavie-Macquin.
- Late-September 2006

James Dove

Important Update -- please read

During a recent visit to Bordeaux for the September 2006 Grand Jury European tasting sessions, I spent an afternoon wandering through several well-known vineyards in Pomerol and St. Emilion.  While the merlot crop had been largely harvested throughout Pomerol by the 24^th of September, several prominent St. Emilion producers sought to get a few more days of ripening before picking would begin.  The ground was still moist from heavy rains the week before and the skins were exceptionally thin and fragile.  After spending a morning walking throughout vineyards at Beausejours Duffau and Becot, I was not prepared for what I would see on the Côte Pavie.

Château Pavie sits at the base of a great south-facing slope just outside the beautiful, medieval village of St. Emilion.  Immediately in front of the property, one finds cabernet franc planted at the base of the slope.  A scenic and winding hillside road, with rows of merlot to either side, gently makes its way up to a plateau above the estate.  Road turns quickly to tractor path and the vines of Pavie meet those of neighbors Troplong Mondot and Pavie Macquin in a picturesque setting atop the hillside.  As I sliced through the vineyard in my Peugeot, I passed a team of cigarette-smoking pickers taking a break from the harvest at Troplong Mondot.  And, after confirming my bearings, I parked the car and began to walk the rows.

Let me say that the personal account that follows is one of a city-dweller who knows almost nothing about current trends in grape viticulture.  Fortunately, I had a camera with me to record the strange scene in front of me:  the vast majority of the grapes hanging limply on the vines of Château Pavie were in a condition halfway between what one would consider to be a fresh, healthy state and raisins.  Quite strangely, where a row of Pavie met that of neighbor Pavie Macquin, the Pavie Macquin row looked ready for a coffee table picture book.  And on the exact same terroir – only a single row away – the picture at Pavie looked desperate with grapes wilting on the vine.  How could this be?

The situation on the plateau above Pavie was methodically repeated by man or nature on the winding pathway to the property itself and among the cabernet franc immediately in front of the château.  The only conclusions I could rationalize were that this raisin-like condition was either encouraged through some vineyard management practice or it was some scourge of nature that seemed to be uniquely afflicting Pavie.  Sharing these photographs with others -- people much more experience than I -- didn’t yield any definitive answers.  But, based on discussions with wine-makers on the left bank, I concluded that such grapes were undesirable and, to the degree possible, would be excluded from the vats at top producers there.

I tasted dozens of raisining grapes that afternoon, just like those pictured here, to the right.  The majority tasted quite unpleasant – like  over-ripe, rotten fruit.  There wasn't the slightest resemblance to the deliciously sweet and crisp taste I had become accustomed to sampling when picking fruit from any other property I had visited, left bank or right.  The acidity was low and there was no freshness to the taste to these grapes.  That said, it’s only fair to say that the very occasional raisined grape tasted pleasant, sweet, even exotic.  But, to my untrained eye, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to this, and certainly no practical way to distinguish one from the other. 

It’s very difficult to imagine that across Pavie’s various plots some catastrophe of man or nature uniquely ravaged their vines, leaving others in the immediate vicinity unscathed.  Is this intentional?  And, if at the same time neighbors were harvesting fruit in a fundamentally different condition – from crisp, fresh, healthy looking berries such as those pictured from Troplong Mondot or Pavie Macquin – then, can we really place the resulting wines in the same class?  At what point does the production method of a wine (if this is indeed what is happening) stray so far beyond tradition and the norm that it produces a class unto itself, much like the producers of Amarone and trokenbeerenauslesen did in years past?

On Sunday, October 1^st, several days after my walk through the vineyards around Pavie, we tasted the forty 'top' wines of the 2003 vintage in a single event following the tasting of over 130 others.  And, while many of the right bank wines had the baked fruit and prune-tinged flavors common with extreme ripeness, only one wine had the distinct flavor of raisins.  It was Château Pavie.  After witnessing the state of the vineyard and using my general familiarity with Pavie, it was not especially difficult to identify Pavie among the 39 other wines presented blind at the GJE tasting.  Even with other famously ripe right bank wines inserted into the tasting – Pavie was singular in its complex-if-raisiny aromatic profile. It made me think of an Amarone inserted among Barolo. 

After the tasting, I wondered whether, with Pavie, we may have a wine that’s best considered in its own class, rather than within the context of other Bordeaux wines.   Is Pavie made in manner that is fundamentally different than almost any other wine from the region?  I'm not going to criticize anyone for finding Pavie to be a great wine.  While it is not my style of wine, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

But, can Pavie be considered a great Bordeaux wine?

- BordeauxNut
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