2012 Chateau Clos Dubreuil St. Emilion Grand Cru Bordeaux 750 ml

A “tour de force.” A “home run, which is especially impressive in 2012.”

That kind of praise from Robert Parker himself is itself enough to set off a scramble among collectors. But then we saw the score for the 2012 Clos Dubreuil—95 points—we did a double-take. This bottle landed above Lafleur and Angélus, matching Cheval Blanc and Le Pin! 

This is a wine that clearly deserves its critical praise, and an absolute bargain of Parker’s 2012 Right Bank superstars. Now, with a decade plus of age on it, it’s drinking PERFECTLY.

There are some winemakers who inherit a family business and just ride it out, distracted by other passions and never connecting with the tradition that they were born into. That’s not proprietor Benoit Trocard, not by a long shot. At the age of 12, Benoit was learning how to build wine barrels at the side of his great-grandfather. 

Winemaking goes back 15 generations in the family, some four centuries, and Benoit soaked up everything his grandfather and father could teach him. At the age of 24, and with newly minted degrees in business and winemaking, Benoit bought the barely one-acre Clos Dubreuil in 2002. By 2012, the estate had grown to four acres, and Trocard was working hand in glove with 100-point maven Michel Rolland.

Together, the two crafted this stunning, opulent red from the half-century-old Cabernet Franc and Merlot vines on the tiny Saint-Émilion Grand Cru estate. The meticulously tended vines, which sit atop clay soils on a south-facing limestone plateau, combined with the 2012 season, which Wine Spectator rated “outstanding.”