The magnificent month of September in 2014 fully played its salvaging role as an Indian summer, as in so many other good and very good vintages. All the red grape varieties reached an excellent level of ripeness, characterised by great concentration, very high sugar content—the highest since 2010—and excellent acidity. In fact, such balance is typical of Bordeaux’s great wines, whose tannic strength is always accompanied by a pleasant freshness. Although inaugurated in 2015, we used the Foster Cellar for the first time during the 2014 harvest. Under such conditions, this new winemaking facility was able to reveal the full extent of its possibilities: not by replacing our other traditional vat rooms, which remain just as necessary, but by enabling us to go even further in our intra-plot selection and increase our precision in all the steps in the winemaking process. What progress has been made over the past thirty years! We use four times as many vats to produce half the amount of wine… It’s probably the Pavillon Rouge and Margaux du Château Margaux, our third wine, which benefit the most from this recent progress, because it’s at their level that the plot selection has to be particularly rigorous. As for the very great terroirs, they belong to a different world… In any case, only 24% of the harvest has gone into the Pavillon Rouge, whereas 36% has gone into the Grand Vin; the largest share—40%—has gone into the third and fourth wines.

This effort in the selection brings the Pavillon Rouge closer to the Grand Vin, both in quality and in personality, even if it still lacks the magic that belongs only to the great plots.

The proportions of the grape varieties in the Pavillon Rouge blend are classic: 77% cabernet sauvignon, 22% merlot and 1% petit verdot. (October 2025)