Winemaker Notes
Blend: 51% Merlot, 39% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8% Cabernet Franc
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is a solid red with plenty of muscle in the Ormes de Pez way. It’s medium- to full-bodied with dense and chewy tannins that are polished yet lightly austere. Blackcurrants, nutmeg and other spices such as thyme. Nicely austere in a very St.-Estephe way.
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Vinous
The 2022 Ormes de Pez is matured in 45% new oak for a planned 16 months. It has a perfumed and floral bouquet, quite sensual for a Saint-Estèphe, developing blue fruit with time in the glass. The oak is neatly enmeshed. The palate is medium-bodied with quite a high-toned and racy opening. Good acidity, the Merlot (51%) occupies the driving seat and ensures its silky-textured finish, a mote of chalk dust on the aftertaste. Just needs its élevage to knit it all together. –Neal Martin
Barrel Sample: 92-94 -
Wine Spectator
This is stylish in the way it captures the warm cassis and mulled plum fruit of the vintage, along with the AOC's telltale warm stone, lilac and iron accents. The long, smoldering finish pulls everything together thanks to a subtle chalky thread. Understated and nicely done. Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
I have followed Les Ormes de Pez since the mid-1970s. While records indicated the first vintage of Château Ormes de Pez, the modern era of this château began when the Caze family acquired the property in 1939. This wine has significantly improved from the first time I tasted it. The 2022 vintage is a remarkable feat given the heat challenges of the vintage. This wine offers aromas and flavors of bold black fruits, savory earth, and attractive oak. Allow this wine to age in the cellar before opening. (Tasted: January 23, 2025, San Francisco, CA)
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Decanter
Dark plums and blackcurrants, ripe and fragranced on the nose, aromatic and open. High, juicy acidity is balanced by fine but chalky tannins and a flint undertone giving the minerality and tension. Powerful and massy, strong but well contained, focussed and all in one line. Good weight and balance, quite a serious and spiced edge but with lots of freshness throughout. A little strict and herbal, with the wood showing through, but lovely fruit purity. 2% Petit Verdot completes the blend.
Barrel Sample: 93 -
Jeb Dunnuck
The 2022 Château Ormes De Pez is based on 51% Merlot, 39% Cabernet Sauvignon, and the rest Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. Rocking levels of black cherries, red plums, spicy wood, and tobacco all emerge from this round, medium to full-bodied, voluptuous, sexy 2022 that's already hard to resist.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Ormes de Pez offers up an exotic, aromatic bouquet of sweet red fruit compote and flowers, followed by a medium-bodied palate with a rich, soft attack that segues into a somewhat tannic, ephemeral finish. It's a solid, modern-styled 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.