The Château Pavie 2005 has a gorgeous bouquet, very pure and refined with intense blackberry, blueberry, baking powder, violet and mineral-scented bouquet that is utterly entrancing. The palate is full-bodied with lavish ripe black cherries, blueberry and cassis fruit that lacquer the mouth. There is amazing volume and intensity here, a voluminous Pavie and yet it does not stint on precision or elegance on the finish. This is a sumptuous, ravishing, seamless wine that is irresistible and unlike Pavie-Decesse, it is just beautifully proportioned, the terroir starting to seep through as the winemaking recedes. One of the finest wines on the Right Bank.

– eRobertParker.com, Feb 2015

Saturated, deep ruby-red. Knockout nose combines blackberry, minerals, crushed rock, truffle, vanillin oak and flowers; showing none of the porty quality of the sample I tried last year. A hugely concentrated essence of a wine, offering an incredible combination of sweetness, vibrancy and precision of fruit, thanks to strong acidity and powerful underlying minerality. The chewy tannins are totally buffered by the wine's material on the explosive back end. This wine has it all! Compared to the Pavie-Decesse, which essentially comes from a single block of old vines on limestone, this wine has clearly benefited by being an assemblage of soil types, with fruit from the foot of the slope contributing texture and richness. The 2005 Pavie should easily last for three or four decades.

Gérard Perse believes this is the greatest Pavie he’s made to date, although certainly I would argue that list includes the 2000, as well as the 2009 and 2010, among his superstars. This wine, which I had both in the 2005 horizontal report in the Wine Advocate, and at a mini-vertical with Perse at the restaurant Maison Boulud in Montreal, looks to be a 75- to 100-year wine. Dense, opaque purple to the rim, with a gorgeously promising nose of blackberries, cassis, graphite and cedar wood just beginning to emerge, it tastes more like a three-year-old than wine that is already a decade old. This beauty is intense and full-bodied, with magnificent concentration, a majestic mouthfeel and a total seamless integration of tannin, wood, alcohol, etc. Beautifully rich, full and multidimensional, this is a tour de force in winemaking and certainly one of the top dozen or so 2005 Bordeaux. Forget it for another 3-5 years and drink it over the following 50-100 years!

Robert Parker (Wine Advocate #220, Aug 2015)

The 2005 Pavie is deep garnet with a touch of brick. It skips out of the glass with bright, lively notes of Morello cherries, plum preserves, red roses, and candied violets followed by hints of menthol, dark chocolate, and underbrush. The full-bodied palate is so vibrant and energetic that it sparkles. Youthful red and black fruit notes comingle with mineral and floral sparks, framed by fine-grained tannins and wonderful tension, finishing with epic length and depth. This is a triumph. Lisa Perrotti-Brown Dec 2023 - The Wine Independent

Even more flamboyant and sexy than the 2000, the 2005 Pavie has everything you could ever want from a wine. Deep, inky purple-colored, an awesome perfume of cassis, blackberries, toasty oak, graphite, and incredible minerality, full body, sweet tannin, and a blockbuster finish all make for an extraordinary Saint-Emilion. It’s still a baby but offers incredible pleasure today. It’s going to last for another 3-4 decades.