Clos du Jaugueyron

He was a serious looking man with wild hair and dark, soulful eyes from the Languedoc-Roussillon. She had a kind face, and was from arguably one of the most prestigious wine regions in the world – Bordeaux. They met when he went there to study Oenology in 1988 and fell in love. In 1993, the couple decided to lay down roots and purchased a small parcel in Cantenac, and in 1994 the first vintage of Clos du Jaugueyron was born. 

The story of Clos du Jaugueyron is simple: boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy and girl team up and become a wine powercouple bucking all established norms in one of the most traditional and built up wine regions in the world. Needless to say, we’re rooting for them (it helps that they're also the best natural wine producer in the entire region, and one of the best anywhere).

Michel and Stéphanie Destruhaut have 7-hectares of vines in Arsac, Cantenac, and Margaux. These vines thrive in classic Médoc soils, which are a mixture of gravel and sand. Michel is a firm believer in biodynamic viticulture and officially converted the estate to these practices for their 2008 vintage. His belief is that all great wines are made in the vineyard as opposed to the cellar. The plots with finer soils yield mineral-driven wines, while the richer clay-based soils lend round and powerful fruit.   

The vinification process is a fairly straightforward one, and the grapes go into the tanks whole cluster to promote gentle extraction. Native yeasts carry out the fermentations, and the wines are transferred to barrique, with only 25% of it being new. The resulting wines are the perfect blend of minerality and bright red fruit, yielding wines we thought Bordeaux no longer made. In a region where greed and commercialism run rampant, Clos du Jaugueyron is truly refreshing with their honestly-made, Cabernet-centric expressions of Left Bank Bordeaux.