Bordeaux

The 1855 classification came out of the Exposition Universelle in Paris, when Emperor Napoleon III requested a classification system for the wines France intended to show the world. The job went to Bordeaux's own brokers — the men who knew exactly what every château's barrels were fetching that year. They ranked on reputation and trading price, from first to fifth growths. Nobody sat down and tasted anything blind.

The list was never a survey of Bordeaux. Every red on it came from the Médoc except one: Château Haut-Brion, in Graves. The whites were an afterthought, limited to the sweet varieties of Sauternes and Barsac and ranked only from superior first growth to second growth. Pomerol, where Pétrus sits, was left out entirely and has never had a classification since.

Three things have moved on the list in 170 years. Cantemerle was added as a fifth growth in 1856. Mouton Rothschild rose from second growth to first in 1973, after decades of lobbying by Philippe de Rothschild. And Château Dubignon vanished — a third growth from Margaux that was absorbed into the estate Château Malescot St. Exupéry. In 1855 only five estates even used the word "château".

In 1381 a convent of Carthusian friars was founded outside Bordeaux's walls, and a suburb grew around the monastery on drained marsh. From the 17th century it filled with English, Flemish and Irish wine merchants — foreigners obliged to settle outside the walls. Shut out of the city, they took the trade instead, and Bordelais wit named them for it: the aristocratie du bouchon, the aristocracy of the cork.

Working as brokers and négociants, the Chartrons families founded firms that sold Bordeaux into their home countries, and lined the Garonne with ageing warehouses. Their reach shaped the land too: Dutch traders drained the swampy ground of the Médoc in the seventeenth century so it could be planted with vines. The merchants left after 1945, but their machine outlived them — en primeur, barrel samples tasted at 6 to 8 months and sold as futures, still prices the vintage.

There are five classifications of Bordeaux wines, not one: the 1855 list, Graves, Saint-Émilion, Crus Bourgeois du Médoc and Cru Artisans. The last is the most human. In the 19th century, many craftsmen in the Médoc countryside — wheelwrights, blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, bakers and others — owned small vineyard parcels that they cultivated themselves, and the category keeps their descendants on the map.

Bordeaux is replanting for a hotter climate. Wineries authorised four new red grapes against climate change — Marselan, Touriga Nacional, Castets and Arinarnoa — but only for wines designated Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur, so no classified estate may use them. Three new whites were permitted too: Alvarinho, Petit Manseng and Liliorila. Meanwhile the vineyard shrinks: during 2024 the planted area fell from 103,000 hectares to 95,000.

Bordeaux's vineyards were ruined by phylloxera, first recorded in France in 1863 at Pujaut in the Gard. Within a few decades just under half of all French vineyards were destroyed — almost 2.5 million hectares — and wages in the wine industry were cut to less than half. Gaston Bazille proposed grafting French vines onto American rootstock, which is what worked.

The rootstock that saved Bordeaux came from Texas. Thomas Volney Munson provided native Texan rootstocks for grafting, and in 1888 the French government sent a delegation to Denison, Texas to decorate him. Hermann Jaeger of Neosho, Missouri exported 17 boxcars of his resistant rootstock to France. Every classified growth on the 1855 list now grows on American roots — a fact no label mentions.

Saint-Émilion runs the experiment the Médoc refuses: a classification revised every decade. It has gone badly in public. The 2006 edition was declared invalid after legal action, and in July 2008 a court ruled the tasting mechanism had not been impartial. Xavier Pariente of Troplong-Mondot, demoted, called it "almost 20 years of hard work and investment by all the personnel here wiped out at the stroke of a pen". For 2012, INAO handed judgement to outsiders from Burgundy, the Rhône, Champagne and the Loire. Even that did not hold: Angélus and Cheval Blanc withdrew in 2021, Ausone in 2022.