98 pts - Wine Advocate
Deep garnet-purple colored, the 2016 Ducru-Beaucaillou features a wonderfully savory, earthy/meaty nose, delivering well-defined notes of tapenade, truffles, charcuterie and sautéed herbs over crème de cassis, wild blueberries and kirsch with wafts of pencil lead and menthol. Medium to full-bodied, the palate is built like a brick house with the taut, muscular fruit well framed by very firm yet very ripe and finely grained tannins, offering a quiet intensity of red fruit and mineral sparks and finishing with epic length.- Lisa Perrotti-Brown (11/2018)
97 pts - Vinous
The 2016 Ducru-Beaucaillou, bottled in August 2018, is very deep in color. It has a tightly wound bouquet of blackberry, boysenberry and minerals and a faint estuarine tang of oyster shells. The palate is medium-bodied with very fine tannin, layers of pure blackberry and wild strawberry, and veins of blue fruit tinged with a conspicuous graphite note that becomes more pronounced with aeration. This is almost a Pauillac-like Ducru-Beaucaillou, quite noble and blue-blooded. A wine that should give 40 to 50 years of drinking pleasure.- Neal Martin (01/2019)