Château Ducru-Beaucaillou 1982 is a wine of the very highest historical significance: produced in what is widely regarded as the greatest Bordeaux vintage of the twentieth century’s final quarter, by one of the Médoc’s most consistently admired Deuxième Cru estates, in a period when Bruno-Eugène Borie’s family management had brought the estate to the peak of its quality trajectory. The 1982 Bordeaux vintage, identified by Robert Parker as one of the great modern classics when most other critics had dismissed it as over-ripe and atypical, produced wines of extraordinary concentration, aromatic richness and structural depth that have developed over forty-three years into some of the most complex and rewarding Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant wines ever produced in any country or appellation. Ducru-Beaucaillou’s specific position in Saint-Julien, where the estate’s 80 hectares of deep gravel over alios subsoil provide the ideal combination of drainage, water retention and mineral depth for the late-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon of the 1982 vintage, produced in that year a wine of extraordinary character that has been consistently described as one of the finest wines the estate has ever made. At over four decades from harvest, this is wine of genuinely rare historical maturity.

Saint-Julien’s 1982 wines are consistently described by those who have tasted them as among the finest expressions of the appellation’s Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant style ever produced: combining the extraordinary concentration and opulence of the 1982 vintage with the elegance and mineral precision that the Saint-Julien terroir reliably provides even in its most powerful expressions. A 1982 Ducru-Beaucaillou at this stage of its development will have completed the primary, secondary and tertiary development arcs of a very great Bordeaux red wine, entering the fourth stage of development that only the finest wines from the finest vintages achieve: a plateau of extraordinary complexity where the wine’s fundamental structural integrity continues to provide the framework for decades of continued pleasure.

A 1982 Château Ducru-Beaucaillou is among the rarest and most historically significant red wine acquisitions in this entire catalogue: a wine of exceptional pedigree, extraordinary vintage quality and forty-three years of documented development, from one of the Médoc’s most consistently celebrated second-growth estates.

Mature garnet with a complex, extraordinary and deeply evolved nose of tobacco, cedar, iron, leather, dried cherry, truffle, dried violet, earthy mineral and the extraordinary tertiary complexity of a great Saint-Julien Cabernet Sauvignon at over four decades of bottle development. Full-bodied with seamlessly integrated, silky tannins, remarkable residual acidity and a very long, savoury, mineral finish of historic complexity. Drink now through 2035.