Bernard Magrez’s Les Trésors Bordeaux range tests the rules

Les Trésors de Bernard Magrez is a new 22-wine limited-edition Bordeaux range unveiled by Bernard Magrez, built around multi-vintage blends, cross-estate cuvées, parcel selections and sandstone amphorae. At its Paris launch tasting, the collection placed Château Pape Clément, Château La Tour Carnet, Château Les Grands Chênes, Château Fombrauge and Clos Haut-Peyraguey inside a format Bordeaux rarely allows itself, with quantities ranging from around 4,000 bottles at most to a few hundred for some cuvées.

The Les Trésors de Bernard Magrez Launch

Bernard Magrez was born in 1936. The new Les Trésors de Bernard Magrez range draws from that estate network, rather than from an outside experimental cellar, which gives the project its collector interest (Wikipedia³).

Magrez is the sole owner of four classified growth châteaux in Bordeaux classified appellations, and he also owns wine estates beyond Bordeaux in France, Argentina, California, Chile, Japan, Morocco, Portugal and Spain. In the July 2009 Decanter Power List, he placed at number 29. (Wikipedia³).

The launch matters because Bordeaux has usually trained buyers to think in a clean sequence: one château, one vintage, one appellation, one grand vin, sometimes a second wine or third label. Les Trésors de Bernard Magrez interrupts that sequence with 22 wines packaged as limited editions, including Cuvée Amphoria from Château Les Grands Chênes, Mes 5 Pépites from five estates, and multi-vintage bottlings from Les Grands Chênes and La Tour Carnet.

The Paris tasting introduced the range to collectors. The project attaches Bordeaux experimentation to classified-growth addresses, Médoc parcels and Sauternes pedigree.

Why These Limited-Edition Bordeaux Blends Break Convention

Philippe Magrez, Bernard Magrez’s son and co-owner of Bernard Magrez Grand Vignobles, described the range as giving experienced drinkers something unfamiliar without severing the link to named châteaux. Philippe Magrez told Decanter that Bordeaux no longer represents pleasure.¹

Bernard Magrez put the buyer side in plainer language: "Today, people want emotion and discovery, a taste they don’t know, a story they’d like to hear and share."² In this collection, that discovery comes through formats Bordeaux usually keeps outside its classified-growth conversation, including multi-vintage assembly, cross-estate blending, parcel selection and ageing in vessels other than oak.

Cuvée Amphoria offers the cleanest technical departure. It is a parcel selection at Château Les Grands Chênes, aged entirely in sandstone amphorae, and its cited price is €30. Bordeaux has a long conversation with oak, especially in the Médoc and Graves, so a sandstone amphora cuvée from a named Magrez estate gives collectors a low-entry way to taste a different ageing choice without abandoning the region.

Mes 5 Pépites takes the cross-estate idea further. That is the kind of composition Bordeaux’s appellation and château culture does not usually put forward under a collector proposition, because the region’s hierarchy usually prizes estate identity over blended estate narrative.

Cuvée 1252 and Cuvée 1409, tied to Pape Clément and La Tour Carnet respectively, assemble the 2019 and 2022 vintages at equal parts. LGC6 from Les Grands Chênes includes 2005, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and 2016, while LTC5 from La Tour Carnet includes 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2016. Lemediavin⁴

Named Cuvées to Put on the Collector Radar

The range spans vessel, vintage, estate and appellation-driven cuvées. Château Pape Clément Cuvée 1252, at €190, leads with a classified Graves name and the 2019 plus 2022 multi-vintage assembly. PC4 sits apart at €4,000, described as an ultra-rare cuvée, with no need to dress the figure in extra theatre.

The multi-vintage bottlings carry the strongest cellar-logic signal. LGC6 gathers six vintages, 2005, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and 2016, from Les Grands Chênes. LTC5 gathers five vintages, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2016, from La Tour Carnet. For a collector used to buying Bordeaux by vintage chart, these cuvées ask a different question: how does an estate present continuity when the final wine deliberately refuses a single harvest date?

The range also includes Confiance, Emotion, Sérénité and Tempérance, parcel selections chosen by viticultural teams across Haut-Médoc, Médoc, St-Emilion and Pessac-Léognan. The parcel selections tie the project to vineyard choices. Pessac-Léognan has additional Magrez relevance, because his Bordeaux holdings expanded in 2012 with Château Malleprat in Pessac-Léognan, and in 2017 with Château Le Sartre in the same appellation (Wikipedia³).

Clos Haut-Peyraguey appears through a special selection Sauternes, giving the collection a sweet-wine anchor from a classified growth in Sauternes. Pape Clément also appears beyond red wine, with a special-edition white and the Reconnaissance blanc tasted at the Paris launch. Decanter singled out Reconnaissance blanc as a selection from parcels used in the estate’s top white.

Scarcity, Pricing and Estate Pedigree

That range of bottle counts gives the collection its allocation character, even before individual market availability enters the picture. A few hundred bottles and a 4,000-bottle cuvée will move through international partner allocations differently.

Decanter also noted that the majority of the range falls under €100 a bottle.

Estate pedigree carries much of the risk for this project. Château Pape Clément in Graves, Château La Tour Carnet in Haut-Médoc, Château Fombrauge in St-Emilion and Clos Haut-Peyraguey in Sauternes supply experimental lots. Magrez’s ownership of four Grands Crus Classés de Bordeaux makes the range harder to dismiss as a side label exercise, because the collection borrows authority from estates collectors already recognize.

Decanter described Mes 5 Pépites with pencil shavings and ripe fruits-of-the-forest on the palate, while Cuvée 1252 and LTC5 showed pure aromatics, fresh ripe fruits, wood spices and gravelly wet stones.

How to Find the Wines, and What to Watch Next

The wines are available in international markets through Bernard Magrez’s partners. The collection’s limited quantities leave each cuvée moving through the trade differently, from a few hundred bottles of one wine to around 4,000 bottles of another.

The wider Bernard Magrez Experience adds context around the bottles for Bordeaux-bound travelers. The group includes a cultural institute, a boutique hotel in Bordeaux and a two-Michelin-star restaurant. The Bernard Magrez Wine Academy offers tastings, vertical tastings of great wines, food and wine pairing workshops, and a B-Winemaker assembly workshop that lets visitors create their own blend from scratch. For this particular launch, that blending workshop now feels newly aligned with the house’s collector-facing message.

Les Trésors de Bernard Magrez will be judged bottle by bottle: Cuvée Amphoria by its sandstone amphora ageing, Mes 5 Pépites by the integration of five 2018 estate wines, LGC6 and LTC5 by how their older vintages carry freshness across the blend, and Pape Clément Cuvée 1252 by how 2019 and 2022 meet in the same glass. Bordeaux has built its market on place and vintage discipline, and Magrez has put 22 limited-edition wines into circulation.