Matthew Jukes om:
Chateau Beausejour Duffau-Lagarrosse 1er Grand Cru Classe B
Winemaker Joséphine Duffau-Lagarrosse finished building her new chai last year in time for the 2024 harvest, and it is now one of the most beautiful small wineries I have seen. The spectacular panoramic vineyard landscape, carved into the façade of her vats, provided a stunning backdrop to what she described as the most exacting wines she has ever made. First, Beauséjour lost 30% of its crop to mildew. While drastic sorting in the vineyard reduced yields dramatically, a further forensic inspection using two sorting tables in the winery cut these yields by 10-15% more. While harvest usually requires thirty pickers who move through approximately 2ha per day, this vendange demanded fifty pickers whose pace was cut to only 0.7ha of vines per day. This attention to detail and profound sacrifice are in part responsible for the stellar quality of this wine (and its second label). But in the winery, Joséphine explained that she remained completely open-minded about how to approach the vinification. As you will be aware, 2024 is a genuine ‘vigneron’s vintage’ and she, perhaps masochistically, enjoyed the endless challenges before her. One of the critical decisions was how best to get the most from her press wine. Usually, Joséphine cuts the cake in a traditional manner, like a layered birthday cake in triangular segments, which means that the heart is inevitably topped and bottomed with slightly different (perhaps not optimal) densities of skins and juice contained therein. This year, she sliced the cake into horizontal sections, pressing each stratum separately, leading to a huge leap in the quality of this wine, after careful selection! She added 3% of this precious press wine to the second wine and 7% to the Grand Vin and is convinced that this seemingly small component makes all the difference. I must agree! This ‘new cellar / new press wine approach’ has raised the bar further for Beauséjour, and in this difficult vintage, this wine appears to have transcended all possibilities by achieving true ripeness, extraordinary purity and depth of flavour, but with a delicacy and weightlessness that confounds the senses. Super-clean, slender, peony and violet-soaked and phenomenally beautiful, this is a model Saint-Émilion in 2024, not least because it captures this unique property’s elemental essence while embracing its fruit’s magical textures. There is no sense of extraction here, only intricate free-flowing detail held together with an invisible limestone latticework. The result is breathtaking as it differs from all other properties’ wines in this vintage.
