2024 La Croix de Beaucaillou
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Tasting notes
There's no Petit Ducru in the vintage, and the 2024 La Croix Ducru-Beaucaillou is based on 86% Cabernet Sauvignon and 14% Merlot. Offering cassis, graphite, violets, and spicy oak, it's medium-bodied and beautifully layered, with a pure, seamless mouthfeel, ripe tannins, and solid depth through the mid-palate. It's a seriously impressive second wine in the vintage.
Critic scores
Average Score
Yohan Castaing, Wine Advocate
Jane Anson, Inside Bordeaux
More reviews and scores
With a delicate, gently spicy bouquet of cassis, cassis blossoms and raspberries, the 2024 La Croix de Beaucaillou offers a moderately weighted palate built around firm, structuring tannins and a vibrant core of fruit with a lively, energetic mid-palate that reflects the early-picked Merlot, lending freshness and lift to this well-defined, elegant cuvée.
A big jump up in depth and quality on the aromatics from Madame de Beaucaillou, here you get unmistakable mid palate weight and texture, with juice and salinity on the finish, 3.7pH. Harvest 23 September to 8 October. 60% new oak (in 2022 it was at 80%). Good stuff from the Ducru team, delivering an earlier drinking vintage of this wine that maintains estate signature.
The 2024 La Croix Ducru-Beaucaillou matured in two-thirds new oak this year, the usual percentage. It has a precise bouquet with blackberry, wild strawberry and background slate-like aromas. This is finely focused, though more understated than recent vintages. The palate is medium-bodied and quite peppery, with grainy tannins, gentle grip and a slightly stony finish. This is a more linear and classically styled Deuxième Vin that will deserve two or three years in bottle.
About the producer
Second Growth estate Ch. Ducru-Beaucaillou in Saint-Julien is one of the Super Seconds, an elite group of properties producing wines that regularly compete with the finest in the Médoc.