As with so many good and very good vintages, the magnificent month of September played an important role in saving the Indian summer of 2014. All the red grape varieties reached an excellent ripeness level, 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. Under such conditions, our new cellar and fermentation tanks have allowed us to see the complete scope of possbilities in the wine-making process, not by replacing our other traditional vat rooms, which are still important, but by enabling us to further our intra-plot selection, and increase our precision in all the steps in the wine-making process. How far we have come in thirty years! We use four times as many vats to produce half the amount of wine… It’s probably the Pavillon Rouge and Margaux de 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 Pavillon Rouge, whereas 36% has gone into the first wine; the largest share - 40% - has gone in the third and fourth wines.


This effort in the selection brings the Pavillon Rouge closer to the first wine, as much in quality as 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 2018)