2000 Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou, Saint-Julien, Bottle (750ml)

Wine Advocate | 96 Points

"Composed of 70% Cabernet Sauvignon and 30% Merlot, the medium to deep garnet-brick colored 2000 Ducru-Beaucaillou charges out of the gate with flamboyant scents of baked black currants, raisin cake, prunes, Chinese five spice and eucalyptus plus touches of cigar box, new leather and cast iron pan. Medium-bodied, the palate is remarkably refreshing with all these decadent spice and dried berries layers coating the palate, textured by soft, powdery tannins, finishing long and mineral laced. Stunning! "

John Gilman | 96 Points

"It had been more than a decade since I last tasted a bottle of the 2000 Château Ducru-Beaucaillou and time has certainly been kind to this beautiful wine! It is starting to stir nicely and really shows a level of complexity and breed that only First Growths routinely exude. The bouquet is still youthful, but pure, complex and refined, wafting from the glass in a mix of cassis, sweet dark berries, violets, a fine base of gravelly soil tones, tobacco leaf, a suave framing of new oak and lovely smokiness in the upper register. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and impeccably balanced, with a rock solid core of sweet black fruit, stunning soil signature and grip, fine-grained tannins and a long, focused and utterly seamless finish. This wine still needs a good decade in the cellar to further soften up its tannins, but it is now very easy to read its future greatness. It is borderline criminal that Ducru and Pichon-Lalande are not First Growths!"

Ducru-Beaucaillou is "Super Second" from Saint-Julien whose gravelly terroir along the Gironde produces wines with the precision and aging potential of a First Growth at a fraction of the price.

2000 was a celebrated, near-perfect Bordeaux vintage across the Médoc, and this wine was built firm and muscular in its youth, arriving exactly where it was always headed a quarter century on.

Cassis, sweet dark berries, violets, and gravelly soil tones open into tobacco leaf, cigar box, mint, and a fine thread of smoke, with baking spice and liquorice root emerging as the wine settles into its tertiary phase. It's deep and full-bodied, with a rock-solid core of black fruit and the kind of grip that only comes from serious soil signature.

Twenty-five years in, it's arrived at its sweet spot: still built with plenty of acid to stay fresh, still carrying real fruit concentration, with tannins just beginning to show a touch of leafy dryness at the edges.

It's not a wine still climbing toward its peak. It's a wine standing right on top of it, with a long plateau still ahead.