2000 Chateau Brane Cantenac 2nd Grand Cru Classe Margaux 750 ml

A slumbering giant awakens in the Médoc

On the great wine trails of France, June makes for quantity, August for style, and September for quality. During the 2000 growing season in Bordeaux, August was glorious, and September featured day after day of turquoise skies and a couple intense heat spikes.

As usual, Robert Parker recognized what was going on before most. He wrote: “That was never more true than 2000, when August left its stylistic imprint on the wines’ enormous tannic content and richness, and the nearly flawless month of September (the finest since 1990) produced many wines of exhilarating quality.”

But Parker wasn’t the only one glowing about 2000. James Suckling called it the “vintage of a lifetime.” Master of Wine Jancis Robinson marveled at the “great consistency and balance” achieved by the wines of this long, concentrated season.

Seventeen years after the monumental harvest of 2000, the greatest wines of the vintage continue to put on weight, showing off the intense concentration and age-worthy structure of The Wine Advocate’s 96-point vintage. The 2000 Château Brane-Cantenac, already marvelous, has yet to hit full stride — here’s why.

The Lurton family has been guiding the “Super Second” Château Brane-Cantenac since 1925, and the family legacy is taking full advantage of their incredible estate vineyards. Set on gravel-studded clay soils, the 185 acres of vines have only improved with age, hitting a high note in 2000. The year before, third-generation winemaker Henri Lurton remodeled the production facilities for lot-by-lot fermentation, while increasing vine density and adjusting cepage to the benefit of the Grand Vin.

The finished wine was 42% Cabernet Sauvignon, 55% Merlot, and 3% Cabernet Franc — resembling the Merlot-heavy final blend of nearby Château Palmer, which shares a clay terrace with Brane-Cantenac. After 18 months in 60 percent new French oak, the wine was bottled, and cellared in the cool caves beneath the château — where it hasn’t moved, until now.

The 2000 Château Brane-Cantenac is ruby-red with hints of purple at the core, fading to a light garnet rim. On the nose, slightly dried raspberry, marionberry, and damson plum mix seamlessly with cigar tobacco, cedar, and graphite. Luxuriously smooth and silken on entry, explosive dried black cassis and luscious Bing cherry fruit mingles with savory tobacco spice, tinged with graphite, vanillin, espresso, and bittersweet baking chocolate. Whispers of smoke emerge on a 45-second finish, which rides a wave of mouthwatering acid and refined tannins.

The 2000 Château Brane-Cantenac is the perfect example of a wine that has yet to hit full stride. When he tasted it in barrel in 2002, Robert Parker immediately pegged it as “undoubtedly the greatest Brane Cantenac in the post World War II era.” Then in 2015, Parker’s protégé Neil Martin raved over its “impressive length” and “genuine complexity on the finish,” before slapping 93 points onto a “really quite fabulous, almost aristocratic Brane-Cantenac.” The Wine Advocate’s most recent estimate placed its peak extending into 2035 — and even that might be underestimating this knockout classic claret!

Perfect provenance, direct from Brane-Cantenac’s cellars in Margaux. With 17 years behind it, the “Super Second” 2000 Brane-Cantenac is just getting fired up for the beginning of what will inevitably be an epic drinking window that will last another two decades. 150 bottles. Free shipping included on 1.