2018 Chateau du Grava Bordeaux Superieur 750 ml

Delivering the kind of classic, powerful Bordeaux experience that used to belong solely to expensive appellations like Graves or St.-Émilion, the 2018 Château du Grava Bordeaux Supérieur is the kind of wine we drive all over France to find. 

And when we do find a wine like this one—and learn that it has NEVER, ever been imported into the United States—well, that’s when we know we have the best kind of offer on our hands: an overdelivering blockbuster that we can bring to Wine Access members… and Wine Access members alone. 

Château du Grava is a stellar value Bordeaux, broad-shouldered and deeply fruited, with a backbone and complexity that impressed us to the core the first time we tried it. The product of one of the region’s best vintages in the past decade, it’s got uncommon power and intensity, especially for a wine in the under-$35 category.

The original plan was simply to stay at Château du Grava, the beautiful estate that a friend recommended as a perfect place to decompress after several grueling weeks of tasting. We’d relax by their limestone-edged pool, eat decadent meals in their dining room, and drink the wine we’d accumulated on our trip.

But on the second day, our hostess discovered that we were in the wine industry—and suddenly we had a row of barrel samples lined up in front of us. Our misgivings about having to go back to work evaporated as soon as we tasted the 2018 Château du Grava. It was better than a lot of much pricier stuff we had tasted the previous week, and we knew that we had a new secret we could share.

Dark ruby-purple in our glasses, the wine is explosively aromatic, with scents of dark plums, rosemary, warmed blackberries, violets, and a hint of pipe tobacco. It gets even better on the palate, with a tantalizing interplay between bright red-currant freshness and a deeper dark-fruit core. It’s all balanced out with hints of cocoa powder and cedar that kept us coming back for another taste.

The topper? Their wines weren’t yet exported to the US, so we could give our members a leg up on the rest of the country.

Located in the town of Haux, right in the heart of Entre-Deux-Mers—between the Garonne and Dordogne rivers—Château du Grava enjoys sandy-clay soils that remind us of Graves. Those soils help produce the sort of complex, delicious wine that proudly carries the Bordeaux Supérieur designation—the highest accolade for a red wine from the area.

2018 will go down as one of the greatest vintages ever for Bordeaux. A hot, dry end to the growing season made for bold, powerful wines—and yielded incredible grapes that enabled less-heralded châteaux to enjoy ripening benefits usually reserved for the great growths. The Wine Advocate loves the year for early drinking, praising the wines for “rich, already flamboyant fruit and beautifully plush tannins” that make them approachable early.

That early drinkability is definitely the case with the 2018 Grava, but there’s enough backbone for this to comfortably age and develop for a decade. That makes it a lovely candidate for a case-buy, so you can open bottles often and enjoy the evolution.