Winemaker Notes
Château Les Ormes de Pez is a harmonious, spicy and distinctive wine that reveals the authenticity of its terroir in the Saint-Estèphe appellation. It will charm you with its opulence, elegance and well-rounded structure. The palate offers robust tannins whilst retaining a smooth, fleshy side.
Blend: 50% Merlot, 40% Cabernet Sauvignon, 7% Cabernet Franc, 3% Petit Verdot
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from the Cazes team, the 2019 Château Ormes De Pez is gorgeous and shines in the vintage. Pure crème de cassis, mulberries, leafy herbs, Asian spices, and lead pencil all emerge on the nose, and this medium to full-bodied 2019 has the vintage’s pure, focused, elegant style while staying ripe, supple, and textured. The balance is spot on, and it's going to hit maturity in roughly 8-10 years and have two decades of prime drinking.
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James Suckling
This shows lots of spice, such as cloves and nutmeg, together with dark berries and cherries and some plums. It’s structured and relatively dense, with lovely length and beauty. Needs time to open and come together. 50% merlot, 40% cabernet sauvignon with cabernet franc and petit verdot. Lovely now. Try after 2024.
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Decanter
This wine especially reflects the solar aspects of 2019, more broad than linear in its rich and open-knit expression of jammy fruit. Some hints of southern France give this wine a warm and welcoming aspect, but I like the underlying tannic finesse with subtle expressions of graphite and wet stone.
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Vinous
The 2019 Ormes de Pez has a more Merlot-driven bouquet (54% of the blend), a little fleshier than its peers, quite pure with raspberry and cranberry scents. Fine delineation. The palate is medium-bodied with a sapid entry, good depth, though it does not deliver the precision of the Dame de Montrose and feels more muscular towards the finish. Yet that should see it age well over the next couple of decades. Tasted blind at the Southwold annual tasting.
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Wine Spectator
Offers a delightful mix of dark fruit and fresh flavors, with plum and blackberry notes infused with dark tea, singed cedar and licorice root, all carried by sleek acidity through the finish. Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. Drink now through 2032.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2019 Château Ormes de Pez is firm and satisfying. TASTING NOTES: This wine shines with aromas and flavors of black fruit, rustic spices, and oaky notes. Pair it with Argentine-style grilled ribeye. (Tasted: May 22, 2022, San Francisco, CA)
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Ormes de Pez exhibits generous aromas of sweet berry fruit, rose petals and pencil shavings, followed by a medium to full-bodied, lively and seamless palate that's bright and integrated, with an elegantly fleshy core of fruit, fine tannins and a saline finish. Produced by the Cazes family of Château Lynch-Bages, this is invariably one of the most charming, friendly wines of Saint-Estèphe.
Chateau Ormes de Pez has very homogenous soil (a clay gravel mixture typical of Saint-Estephe) and many of the vines are quite old. The grapes are hand-picked. After selecting the vats and blending, the wine is aged in oak barrels for 15 months in a magnificent cellar overlooking the courtyard.
One of the world’s most classic and popular styles of red wine, Bordeaux-inspired blends have spread from their homeland in France to nearly every corner of the New World. Typically based on either Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot and supported by Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot, the best of these are densely hued, fragrant, full of fruit and boast a structure that begs for cellar time. Somm Secret—Blends from Bordeaux are generally earthier compared to those from the New World, which tend to be fruit-dominant.
Deeply colored, concentrated, and distinctive, St. Estephe is the go-to for great, age-worthy and reliable Bordeaux reds. Separated from Pauillac merely by a stream, St. Estephe is the farthest northwest of the highest classed villages of the Haut Medoc and is therefore subject to the most intense maritime influence of the Atlantic.
St. Estephe soils are rich in gravel like all of the best sites of the Haut Medoc but here the formation of gravel over clay creates a cooler atmosphere for its vines compared to those in the villages farther downstream. This results in delayed ripening and wines with higher acidity compared to the other villages.
While they can seem a bit austere when young, St. Estephe reds prove to live very long in the cellar. Traitionally dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon, many producers now add a significant proportion of Merlot to the blend, which will soften any sharp edges of the more tannic, Cabernet.
The St. Estephe village contains two second growths, Chateau Montrose and Cos d’Estournel.