2018 Château Ducru-Beaucaillou Grand Cru Classé St Julien

The Borie family has now owned this stately château for three generations, overlooking the Gironde. Since he took over the château in 2003, Bruno Borie has had only one goal: to make Ducru-Beaucaillou one of the best wines in the Médoc. The vineyards are planted with cabernet sauvignon (70%) and merlot (30%). As the name of the château implies, Château Ducru-Beaucaillou is blessed with a grand pebble-rich terroir that produces perfect cabernet sauvignon. Château Ducru-Beaucaillou takes its name from its "beautiful pebbles" ("beaux Cailloux", in French) which geologists less romantically refer to as Gunzian gravel. These quartz pebbles were deposited by the ancient Garonne at the beginning of the early Quaternary, some two million years ago. It is enough to take a walk through the vineyards to find rich lithological finds. Lydian jasper from the Pyrenees, flint, quartz, agatoids ... This Gunzian gravel creates soils poor in plant nutrients. But it is precisely their agricultural scarcity that guarantees the qualitative excellence of the wines. A choice from nature.

At Ducru-Beaucaillou, excellence is formed inch by inch thanks to an understanding of what the vines have to offer. Experience, intuition, asking questions, for a symbiosis with Mother Earth; people only pass through these noble terroirs. Since nature is a "subject of law", every procedure in the vineyard respects the entire ecosystem: herbicides have been abandoned in favor of mechanical weeds and judicious turf; replacing chemical fertilizers with manure and quality compost; insecticides with pheromones to control vine moths or kaolin clay to lure the green locust. Measures to facilitate aeration and sun exposure of the bunches, to avoid Botrytis and, if applicable, bacilli. Constant monitoring of available nitrogen before harvest. Reasonable viticulture, which earned the property ISO 14001 certification in 2016, supplemented with HVE3 certification (high environmental value level 3) since 2017.