In 1942, Francis Borie therefore took Ducru-Beaucaillou on a life annuity rental from Fernand Odon Desbarats de Burke. A relentless builder, this energetic merchant from Corrèze was also a passionate winegrower at Château Haut Batailley, a classified growth in neighbouring Pauillac. Liked and respected by all, Francis had a deep sweetness of soul; he had no lack of generosity. 

In 1959, Jean-Eugène, succeeding his father, undertook meticulous work to restore the vineyard and the cellars.  Quickly abandoning the family’s merchant business, he dedicated himself to the development and modernisation of the property to put it entirely at the service of the wines he loved so much.    

His considerable efforts began to bear fruit in the second half of the 1950s when Ducru-Beaucaillou’s reputation rose to the highest level in Bordeaux, and it has never been refuted since then.
His superb vintages, combined with his modesty and tongue-in-cheek humour, made him one of the most endearing personalities of the Médoc.

Some sixty years on, the son of Monique and Jean Eugène, Bruno-Eugène, is continuing his father’s work and has redefined the selection policy.  A tireless perfectionist, with a remarkable capacity for hard work, he has just launched an ambitious ten-year plan for the “sustainable reconstruction” of the vineyards and cellars.

Passionate about contemporary art and design, his sensitivity always on the alert, Bruno-Eugène has also entrusted the restoration of the château to another princess, Sarah Poniatowska – a descendant of the much-loved monarch, Stanislas II of Poland. Ducru-Beaucaillou is now at the top of its game, with a series of superb vintages perfectly illustrating the grand silky style of Saint-Julien, as proven by the superlative scores given to the 2019 vintage.

At Ducru-Beaucaillou, excellence is shaped inch by inch thanks to an intimate understanding of what the vines want to offer. Experience, intuition, questioning, for a symbiosis with Mother Earth; humans are only passing through these noble terroirs. Nature being a “subject of law”, every procedure in the vineyard is respectful of the entire ecosystem: herbicides have been abandoned in favour of mechanical weeding and judicious grass cover; chemical fertilisers replaced with manure and quality composts; insecticides with pheromones to fight against grapevine moths or kaolin clay to lure the green leafhopper. Measures to facilitate aeration and sun exposure of the bunches, to avoid Botrytis and, where applicable, bacilli. Before the harvest, constant monitoring of the available nitrogen. Reasoned viticulture, which earned the property ISO 14001 certification in 2016, supplemented since 2017 by HVE3 certification (high environmental value level 3).

Each year, more decision support tools are added for phytosanitary monitoring. Intense controls of the ripeness of the different grape varieties and of each plot; the grapes are continuously tasted and then analysed - IBMP, alcohol degree, anthocyanin potential, technological balance (sugar/acid) - to determine the appropriate harvest date, sector by sector. The young vines are harvested separately. Meticulous management, even within plots, to gain in precision.

There is no fundamentalism, but a resolutely curious, pragmatic, benevolent approach. A kind of “positive modernity” adapted to contemporary viticulture: a research and development unit has been created, today managed by two young engineers who pass on their passion and communicate their discoveries to the teams.  Use of decision support software, based on powerful predictive models, GPS programming of applications for controlled coverage and full traceability, installation of several weather stations to better understand geospatial variations. Through the work of INRA, notably on the physiology of the vine, its nutrition and its virome, this high-precision viticulture, both qualitative and sustainable, is constantly progressing. 

In order to accomplish the great work, there are fifty pairs of hands, fifty manual tasks that follow one after another, behind each bottle of Ducru-Beaucaillou. A multicultural, well-organised and united team, on a human scale. A community of minds united around the same values: a deep attachment to the land, to rural tradition, to the craft dimension of the trade, to the beauty of the gesture. Intuition, know-how, refinement: as in Satie’s music, the fewest notes for the greatest possible effect. In the end, it is an accumulation of care and attention to detail that makes a great cuvée. 

The beauty of the site predisposes the soul to this exceptional growth. On this vast estate of 105 hectares of vineyards in the Saint-Julien appellation stands an elegant building in the Directoire style. A model of its kind. Its neo-classical architecture matches the intimate harmony of vine, sky and water. The raised ground floor gracefully follows the natural level of the land, gently sloping towards the banks of the estuary.

It was in the 1820s that Bertrand Ducru entrusted Parisian architect Paul Abadie with the construction, on the original Gironde house, of a Directoire “chartreuse”, a style fully in favour at the time. The living floor overlooks the cellars and, to the east, the Gironde estuary, on which the heavy traffic in the 19th century offered the spectacle of a navy constantly on the move. The fourteen bay windows form the central façade, topped by a triangular pediment. The side windows and French windows, decorated with a modillioned cornice, feature moulded frames. These, in turn, are topped by a slate roof with sloping sides and skylights. 

At the end of the 19th century, wishing to embellish Ducru-Beaucaillou to be in keeping with the quality of its wines, and the prestige of his wife Princess Maria Caradja of Constantinople, Nathaniel Johnston IV called on Michel-Louis Garros, a native of Barsac in Gironde, a student of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and winner of the Grand Prix d’Architecture in 1887. The famous architect put up two Victorian towers with balustraded terraces on the north and south sides of the old chartreuse, giving a more majestic configuration to the whole building. He redesigned the general layout of the château and luxuriously decorated all of the reception rooms in the Victorian style. 

The estate was not neglected, however, with the construction of a remarkable horseshoe-shaped building. On the ground floor it housed stables, barns, garages and workshops. Upstairs, staff quarters and hay barns, naturally ventilated - in a very ingenious way - using brick lattices facing the north wind.  

A five-hectare park, sloping down to the river, completes this exceptional heritage site. The landscape architect Eugène Bühler, a famous disciple of Michel-Louis Garros, designed it with flower beds, winding paths, a pond and a vegetable garden surrounded by rubble walls and planted with trellised pear trees, and a beautiful wrought-iron greenhouse.  In the park, nicely laid out on three successive terraces, statues of Diana, Bacchus and Demeter offer their necks to the sun, as if to celebrate the family attachment to Mother Earth. Century-old trees, proud witnesses of the estate’s history, seem to be on guard; like the sumptuous Ginkgo biloba that greets the slow course of the clouds over Château Ducru-Beaucaillou with its golden plume. Majestic blue Atlas cedars and green cedars of Lebanon, Sequoias sempervirens, Magnolias Grandiflora, Japanese red maples, Liquidambars, lime trees... Roses with swollen hearts and rhododendrons of delicate shades brush each other lovingly under a light breeze.  In the distance, forests and pastures whisper their secrets to the estuary. Whatever the season, the magic works.

At Ducru-Beaucaillou, the flavours of the Médoc terroir and the wines converse in complicity and with esteem. Always a well-matched and happy conversation.
You only have to step inside the château’s kitchen, with its magnificent copper pans, its sophisticated rotisserie, to understand what is essential here. Here, the rituals of the table are loaded with memory, meaning and mood. Watching Bruno-Eugène officiate, we can say that to love or to cook is basically the same thing. At Ducru-Beaucaillou, everything finishes at the table

Friendly and professional relations. Bruno-Eugène cooks because he can’t forget. The pot-au-feu concocted with vegetables from the garden under the watchful eye of his grandmother; the cep mushrooms furtively picked in the surrounding woods or the woodcock once found near Laubarède. In his cosy lair, he interprets the local gastronomy, born from the old land, the river and the nearby Gascon ocean. That of Alcide Bontou, “the Bordeaux Vatel”, described by Curnonsky as a “great chef” and “fine gourmet”. But no ostentation, no exaggeration, just the intelligence of the product that Bruno-Eugène never ceases to exalt. His authentic, crafted, partisan, sincere cuisine speaks tirelessly of who he is.  

It is a singular, calm and balanced region, the Médoc, a “tongue of land” in the midst of the waters, open to the estuary to the east and bordered by the peaceful pine forest to the west. The peninsula also has a light like no other; steamy, slow, it lazily caresses the thousands of vine branches. The miracle of the Médoc lies in this marriage of the air, the land and the vine¹.  Despite historical ups and downs, the reputation of its wines, which dates from before the Napoleonic classification of 1855, has remained intact, to the point of becoming the benchmark for foreign vineyards.

¹Definition given by Olivier de Serres

This newcomer is a selection derived from our St-Julien vineyards. An affectionate and informative name that already tells wine lovers something about its positioning and its ambitions. 

Le Petit Ducru portends an introduction to the Borie signature, a courteous invitation to approach the qualities of its elders, Ducru-Beaucaillou and La Croix Ducru-Beaucaillou; from its complexity to its structure, by way of its balance and its elegance. There is, of course, a family resemblance, a wonderful complicity between the three nectars. They know what they have in common: a rigorous technical process, drastic selection, demanding winemaking. A Cabernet-Merlot blend and depending on the vintage, sometimes with a hint of Petit Verdot, varietal that we know to be a skillful sculptor.

The wines of La Croix Ducru-Beaucaillou come from the vineyard of Château Ducru-Beaucaillou. This exceptional Médoc terroir is situated between the Gironde River to the east, the centre and the west of the Saint-Julien appellation. The estate owes its name to its “beautiful pebbles” ("beaux cailloux", in French) which, because of their high quartz content, make for soils that are poor in plant nutrients. 

It is precisely this “agrological” paucity, as the late Bordeaux professor and geographer, René Pijassou, described it, that makes them so well-suited to the production of fine wine. In the east, the plots are planted along the rolling Médoc ridges, just above the estuary, while those at the epicentre benefit from a microclimate nurtured by the little La Mouline stream that meanders through the middle of the appellation from west to east before disappearing into the Gironde.

For 300 years, six families have nurtured an indelible bond with Château Ducru-Beaucaillou. They are forever captives of this prestigious estate, be they named Desjean, Bergeron, Ducru, Johnston, Desbarat, or Borie. Its families were never short of praise for it. Over the decades, this devotion has managed to overcome all that is accidental or fleeting, as if passion perfected Nature's opus. 

Château Ducru-Beaucaillou owes its name to its "beautiful pebbles" ("beaux Cailloux", in French) that geologists refer to less romantically as Gunzian gravel. These quartz pebbles were deposited by the ancient Garonne at the beginning of the early Quaternary period, some two million years ago. It suffices to take a walk through the vineyards to make rich lithological finds. Lydian jasper from the Pyrenees, flint, quartz, agatoids... These Gunzian gravels make for soils that are poor in plant nutrients. But it is their very agrological paucity that guarantees the qualitative excellence of the wines. A choice of nature.