2004 Château Paveil-de-Luze

Château Paveil de Luze is a Cru Bourgeois estate in Margaux. The estate’s roots were set in 1820 when Alfred de Luze started a negociant and export business to bring Bordeaux to New York. Several decades later he bought the 80-acre Paveil de Luze estate and began making wine from the estate. Today the sixth generation of the de Luze family run the estate. Vineyards are planted to 65% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Merlot and 5% Cabernet Franc. The estate’s second wine is Château De La Coste.

Bordeaux is the world’s most famous fine-wine producing region. Even non-wine drinkers recognize the names of Bordeaux’s celebrated wines, such as Margaux and Lafite-Rothschild. Located near the Atlantic coast in southwest France, the region takes its name from the seaport city of Bordeaux, a wine trading center with an outstanding site on the Garonne River and easy access to the Atlantic. Like most French wine regions, Bordeaux’s first vineyards were planted by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago, then tended by medieval monks. Aristocrats and nobility later owned the region’s best estates and today estates are owned by everyone from non-French business conglomerates to families who have been proprietors for generations. Bordeaux has nearly 280,000 acres of vineyards, 57 appellations and 10,000 wine-producing châteaux. Bordeaux is bifurcated by the Gironde Estuary into so-called “right bank” and “left bank” appellations. Bordeaux’s red wines are blends of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Malbec. It also makes white wines of Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle. There are several classification systems in Bordeaux. All are attempts to rank the estates based on the historic quality of the wines.