One of Bordeaux’s most visually impressive properties, Château Ducru-Beaucaillou has been under the ownership of the Borie family since 1942, with Bruno Borie taking the reins in 2003. Bruno is nothing short of a perfectionist: since taking control he has roughly halved the production, with only the fruit from the heart of the vineyard being used, established a project for the “sustainable reconstruction” of both the vineyards and the cellars and, from 2011 onwards, he began the lengthy process of checking and re-corking the château’s library stock. 

All ex-château releases since are bottles that have been opened, checked for flaws, topped up, recorked and re-dressed. It is quite some process, and one which enables the discovery of wines from another era without the lottery that is usually involved when opening bottles that are thirty or forty years old.

We can currently offer ex-château stock of the 1988, 1986, 1985 vintages and, most interestingly, the 1982. This is a wine rated 97 points by Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW  “generous and opulent, the palate has beautifully ripe, fine-grained tannins and tons of youthful fruit, finishing with epically long-lasting layers of preserved black fruits and exotic spices”, 97 points by Jeb Dunnuck “This is mature Bordeaux in all its glory” and 96 points by the Wine Advocate’s William Kelley “full-bodied, fleshy and muscular, with a broad attack that segues into a deep core of fruit framed by ripe, powdery tannins and succulent acids”.

We have limited stocks of bottles (packed in six bottle OWCs) of the 2024 release available for delivery, with further stocks of bottles and large formats lying in Bordeaux and available for delivery in the New Year.