Beausejour Duffau Lagarrosse 2021 (750ML)

97 JS / 96 DE / 96 WI / 95 WCI / 94 JD / 94 VM / 94 JA

#52 James Suckling Top 100 France 2024

Fascinating depth and complexity with beautifully knit fruit and oak spices. Glossy, bright but subtle, with lightly smoked herbs, berries, white pepper, mineral, high-grade wood and pencil shavings. Medium to full body with juicy fruit and minerals tapping into an extremely long and layered finish. So much finesse here. Lasting well over a minute. A stunning wine from the vintage. - James Suckling

Pink floral and raspberry aromas, fragrant red cherries and just-ripe strawberries. Incredibly well textured, alive and forward in the glass, this has energy and lift. A really pure and precise bite to the fruit with excellent acidity and style. A delicious, moreish wine, revealing layers of flavour and texture with lovely gentle acidity and a soft, cooling menthol minerality that lingers.. - Georgina Hindle, Decanter

The 2021 Beausejour Duffau-Lagarrosse has a medium to deep garnet-purple color. It reveals evocative notes of black raspberries, kirsch, and juicy blackberries, leading to nuances of violets and aniseed. The medium-bodied palate is wonderfully perfumed and lively, with plush tannins and a long mineral-laced finish. Seriously impressive! - Lisa Perrotti-Brown, Wine Independent

The perfume offers flowers, black cherries, licorice, chocolate-covered plums, crushed rocks, stones, and espresso as its aromatic profile. On the palate, the wine is silky, spicy, vibrant, refined, and focused on its supple-textured, red plum, and dark cherry-filled profile. The long finish is loaded with sweet, ripe, red fruits with a touch of salted chocolate that comes in at the end of the finish. This is quite successful for the vintage. The wine blends 73% Merlot with 27% Cabernet Franc. Yields were low at only 28 hectoliters per hectare. This is the first vintage to sport its new label and its now, abbreviated name. Drink from 2026 - 2055.-Jeff Leve, Wine Cellar Insider

The 2021 Château Beausejour (Duffau-Lagarrosse) checks in as 63% Merlot and 27% Cabernet Franc that was harvested between September 30 and October 14 and was raised in 58% new French oak for 14 months, with the wine spending a few months in tank before bottling. It has a healthy ruby/purple hue as well as an incredible bouquet of black raspberries, ripe cherries, graphite, crushed stone, and hints of spicy herbs. This beauty is medium to full-bodied, has remarkable density on the mid-palate, and ultra-fine tannins. It's clearly in the top handful of wines in the vintage, offering density, terrific purity, and fabulous length. It's never going to be a blockbuster, but it’s an incredibly elegant, seamless wine that will have two decades or more of longevity. Bravo. - Jeb Dunnuck

The 2021 Beauséjour-Duffau (formerly Beauséjour Héritiers Duffau-Lagarrosse) is a gorgeous, refined wine. Silky, aromatic and wonderfully pure, the 2021 is super-impressive right out of the gate. All the elements are so well balanced. Dark cherry, pomegranate, spice and rose petal take shape in the glass, but more than anything, the 2021 is a wine of total finesse. - Antonio Galloni, Vinous Media

You're not going to get the same opulence of the past five years, but this is entirely successful in terms of harmony, elegance and finesse. A jolt of limestone salinity, lemongrass, oyster shell, violets, rose petals, and a subtle but moreish wave of cigar box and graphite smoke. Unrolls slowly but surely, with evident ripeness to the red fruits, and salt-cracker salinity on the finish. Harvest September 30 to October 10 (able to do so because they got only 10mm of rain at the end of September), 28hl/h yield, 58% new oak. Camille Devillenaut co-technical director with Josephine Duffau-Lagarrosse, coming over from Château Villemaurine. Tasted twice. First year with Axel Marchal as consultant, working alongside Michel Rolland (Julien Viaud), replacing the Nicolas Thienpont team. - Jane Anson, Inside Bordeaux

The 2021 Beauséjour (Duffau Lagarrosse) is the first vintage made by Joséphine Duffau Lagarrosse since she took back control of the family estate (arriving on April 12, 2021), and both the vintage and her vision for the property aligned to favor a blend of 73% Merlot and 27% Cabernet Franc—the highest percentage of Cabernet since the early 2000s (when some Cabernet Sauvignon was included in the blend too). The wine has turned out very well in bottle, offering up aromas of raspberries and cherries mingled with rose petals and spices, framed by a touch of creamy new oak. Medium to full-bodied, pure and layered, it exhibits excellent depth at the core, built around lively acids and polished tannins, and concludes with a long, mineral and gently vanillin-inflected finish that's discreetly structured by its élevage. This wonderful clay-limestone terroir really shines through, as does the Cabernet Franc; and with some 68% new oak, foremost from Cadus and Taransaud, it's already less overtly creamy than this estate's wines were a decade ago, even if oak integration could be further refined. - William Kelley, Wine Advocate