1953 Château Pavie St. Émilion Grand Cru Bordeaux France Wine Tasting Note

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1953
94
It is always interesting to taste an older vintage of wine for the time. Tasted blind, this was a beauty. Silky, elegant and refined in texture, the wine opened with a spicy, earthy, tobacco, dark cocoa and red plum nose. On the palate, with its soft, caressing textures, the finish left you feeling great, especially with all the rocks, stones, sea salt and cherries in the endnote.

It is always interesting to taste an older vintage of wine for the time. Tasted blind, this was a beauty. Silky, elegant and refined in texture, the wine opened with a spicy, earthy, tobacco, dark cocoa and red plum nose. On the palate, with its soft, caressing textures, the finish left you feeling great, especially with all the rocks, stones, sea salt and cherries in the endnote.

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When to Drink Chateau Pavie, Anticipated Maturity, Decanting Time

Chateau Pavie is much better with at least 12-15 years of aging in good vintages. Young vintages can be decanted for 3-4 hours or more. This allows the wine to soften and open its perfume.

Older vintages might need very little decanting, just enough to remove the sediment. Chateau Pavie offers its best drinking and should reach peak maturity between 15-40 years of age after the vintage.

Serving Chateau Pavie with Wine and Food Pairings

Chateau Pavie is best served at 15.5 degrees Celsius, 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The cool, almost cellar temperature gives the wine more freshness and lift.

Chateau Pavie is best paired with all types of classic meat dishes, veal, pork, beef, lamb, duck, game, roast chicken, roasted, braised, and grilled dishes. Chateau Pavie is also good when matched with Asian dishes, and rich fish courses like tuna, mushrooms, and pasta.

The wine of Chateau Pavie sparks debates. Hopefully, they are fun debates, but with wine involved, I've seen a few conversations become rather heated! Some tasters love the wine. Count me in that group. It is a favorite wine of Robert Parker. Other consumers do not enjoy the wine and prefer when it was made in a less ripe, thinner, less concentrated style.

My bet is, in time, when the Perse vintages have matured, the greatness of what Perse has accomplished at Pavie will be widely recognized. In fact, as we mentioned earlier, the efforts expended by Perse seem to have vindicated Perse and Parker because September 6, 2012, marked the day Chateau Pavie was upgraded in the official 2012 St. Emilion Classification to Chateau Pavie, St. Emilion, Premier Grand Cru Classe A.

Starting with the 2010 vintage of Chateau Pavie, to protect consumers and fight counterfeits, every bottle, and label from this vintage forward has a locking slip on the capsule with a unique code that matches up to the identical number of the bottle displaying the date the wine was bottled and labeled at Chateau Pavie. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

For the 2012 vintage, to commemorate their promotion to Grand Cru Classe A status, Chateau Pavie introduced a new, sleek, quite artistically designed, regal-looking label in gold and black, replacing the older, classic, green-tinted design. Chateau Pavie returned to the standard label in subsequent vintages.

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