Max de Pourtalès

Where It Started Banking came before winemaking. Before he became a winemaker, De Pourtalès worked in banking, and his return to Bordeaux followed an international banking career rather than a conventional path that began wholly in the cellar. The cellar chapter that appears in his formation is château de Malleret. Working there placed him inside the physical grammar of wine: tanks, extraction, temperature, fruit, tannin, and the long patience that turns vineyard work into a finished bottle. In 1998, he acquired the Saint-Seurin-de-Cadourne château and returned to his Bordeaux roots. That year is the hinge in the story: the point at which an earlier professional life gave way to the daily responsibilities of ownership, viticulture, and oenology.

Who Shaped Them The shaping influence is a house and a region as much as a person. Bordeaux roots frame the move back, while the earlier cellars of château de Malleret form the named place of hands-on cellar experience before ownership. At Doyac, the method is classical rather than ornamental. Vinification is carried out with thermo-regulated stainless steel tanks, temperature control, gentle extraction of phenolic compounds, and an emphasis on tannin finesse. That attention to finesse matters in the specific language of the wines. Le Pélican adds another line to the house vocabulary. Château Doyac Le Pélican appears among the château’s wines with vintages from 2025 to 2022, and the best 2022 is rated 92 Tb. The 2020 Le Pélican rouge is a 100% Merlot cuvée from Haut-Médoc described as charming, easy to drink young, full of fruit, and aged in a big wooden tank.

The Work Today

The contemporary work is biodynamic and shared. De Pourtalès produces a Demeter-certified biodynamic Cru Bourgeois Supérieur red wine with Astrid and Clémence De Pourtalès. The farming path moved in defined steps: the château transitioned to organic farming in 2016 and to biodynamic practices in 2017. In that sequence, the banking-to-wine story becomes a lineage of decisions made in soil, cellar, and bottle. His specialty remains viticulture and oenology, the combined discipline of growing and making. The ownership that began with the 1998 acquisition continues to be read through the wines themselves: Bordeaux fruit, Haut-Médoc structure, controlled extraction, and tannins handled for finesse.