The Golden Age

Two Weeks in April: What the 1855 Classification Actually Ranked, and Why It Never Moved

In 1855, Bordeaux's brokers ranked the Médoc by decades of prices in under two weeks for a world's fair. The list they called an unofficial sketch barely changed.

On 18 April 1855 the syndicate of Bordeaux wine brokers sent the city's Chamber of Commerce a short letter and a list: the liste des vins classés de la Gironde. It sorted the red wines of the Médoc, plus one estate in the Graves, into five classes, and ranked the sweet whites of Sauternes and Barsac in a separate hierarchy. The brokers produced it in under two weeks, held no tasting to do so, and asked that it not be taken for an official document. It has changed twice since: one addition that September, one promotion in 1973. No ranking in wine has lasted longer. What the brokers ranked was neither soil nor cellar work. It was price.

The Paris exposition

The occasion was the Exposition Universelle de Paris of 1855, which Napoleon III's government was organising as France's reply to the Crystal Palace exhibition in London. A regional committee chaired by the prefect of the Gironde asked the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce to collect samples of the department's wines for the Paris jury, which would award medals.

The chamber saw a risk. Medals given on the strength of a few tasted samples could upset a commercial order that the Bordeaux market had built over generations. Bruno Prats of the Académie du Vin de Bordeaux quotes its position from the 1855 correspondence: if proprietors were to use the exposition "to destroy a classification based on the experience of long years, it would be better that none of our wines figure at the exposition at all." The chamber negotiated terms that kept the hierarchy intact. The Gironde's wines would be shown collectively and kept out of competition. Communes would send samples without the owners' names. Only the crus classés would appear under their own names, and for that the chamber needed the list in writing.

Thirteen days

On 5 April 1855 the chamber wrote to the Syndicat des courtiers de commerce, the sworn brokers of the Bordeaux market: "We ask you to send us the very exact and very complete list of all the classed growths of the department, specifying to which of the five classes each of them belongs."

The wording matters. The chamber did not ask whether there should be a classification, or how many classes it should have. It took the five classes as given and asked for them to be written down.

The brokers answered on 18 April. Their list held 57 red wines (four firsts, twelve seconds, fourteen thirds, eleven fourths and sixteen fifths) and 21 whites. A covering note set out its status: "You know how delicate a matter this classification is, and how many susceptibilities it awakens; we have therefore not had the thought of drawing up an official statement of our great wines." What they offered instead, they wrote, was a sketch drawn from the best sources.

The list's boundaries follow the brokers' own order books. Every red but one came from the Médoc. The exception was Haut-Brion in the Graves, the estate that had created the luxury claret brand two centuries earlier and whose price record was too long to leave out. There is no Saint-Émilion and no Pomerol: right-bank wine was traded mostly through Libourne, not through the Bordeaux brokers whose records the list summarised. The word "Château" was still uncommon. Prats counts five entries that carried it: Margaux, Lafite, Latour, Beychevelle and d'Issan.

A ranking of prices

Nothing was tasted. The courtiers were the intermediaries who set prices on the Bordeaux market. The merchant houses paid them to negotiate each proprietor's crop, vintage after vintage, and since the eighteenth century they had kept internal quality categories for exactly that purpose. Prats describes how the system worked. Each year the price of the first growths was fixed according to the vintage and the state of the market; the other classes then followed at customary discounts. The five classes of 1855 are that scale of discounts, written out.

The ranking was therefore old before it was published. Thomas Jefferson, touring the vineyards in 1787, recorded four growths "of first quality": Margaux, La Tour de Ségur, Haut-Brion and Lafite, the same four that headed the 1855 list. He noted that seconds sold for about half the price of firsts. The broker Lawton drew up his own ranking in 1815, and the first published five-class classification appeared in William Franck's treatise on the wines of the Médoc in the 1820s.

These earlier lists were not fixed either. Between Franck and 1855, Ducru-Beaucaillou and Montrose rose to second growth, and Palmer and Calon-Ségur to third. In 1815 Lawton had marked Haut-Brion down, asking whether "the poor state of cultivation of its vines" explained its falling price. The Conseil des Grands Crus Classés describes the 1855 letter in its own history as "the culmination of a market reality and an evolution that had been going on for more than a century." In thirteen days the brokers wrote down a hierarchy that had been shifting for decades, at the point it had reached in April 1855.

Sauternes and Barsac

The whites followed a different logic. All 21 were sweet wines from Sauternes and Barsac; no dry white was classified. There were three tiers instead of five. Yquem alone was ranked premier cru supérieur, the only wine of either colour given a class to itself, above nine premiers crus and eleven deuxièmes crus. The separate list reflected a separate market. In the mid-nineteenth century, Prats notes, the great sweet wines fetched more than most of the reds below the first growths.

Cantemerle and Mouton

The first correction came within months, and it shows how the method worked. Château Cantemerle was absent from the April list because its owner, Caroline de Villeneuve-Durfort, had long sold her wine directly, mostly to Dutch buyers. Its prices never passed through the Bordeaux brokers' books, so the brokers had nothing to rank it on. She produced her sale records. On 16 September 1855, while the exposition was still open, Cantemerle was added to the fifth growths by hand on the original list. Without a price record there was no rank; once the prices were proven, the rank followed.

Nothing else changed for 118 years. On 21 June 1973 Château Mouton Rothschild was promoted from second to first growth by a ministerial decision signed by Jacques Chirac, then minister of agriculture. Baron Philippe de Rothschild had campaigned for it for about twenty years. The estate's own account calls the promotion official entry into an elite to which its prices had long belonged de facto. The motto changed with the rank. Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Mouton suis ("first I cannot be, second I do not deign to be, Mouton I am") became Premier je suis, second je fus, Mouton ne change ("first I am, second I was, Mouton does not change").

Never official, never revised

The brokers said the list was not official. No imperial decree enacted it in 1855, and the chamber had asked for nothing more than paperwork for an exhibition. Prats takes this to its conclusion: strictly speaking, "the 1855 classification does not exist." There is a list of classed growths drawn up by the brokers at the chamber's request, and for a long time its only legal footing was indirect, through labelling rules that reserved the words cru classé for the estates on it.

That status explains why it was never revised. A ranking created by decree can be redone by decree. A ranking that recorded the market's verdict at one date had no procedure for recording a later one.

The estates it describes kept changing. The classification ranks properties, not plots of ground, and property boundaries have moved through purchases, exchanges and divisions ever since, most of all in Margaux, where holdings were already closely interlocked in 1855. Divisions alone took the reds from 58 growths (after Cantemerle) to 61 today and the whites from 21 to 27, with no new estate admitted.

Prices moved further. On Prats's index, a second growth sold for about 88% of a first growth's price in 1824, 74% in 1863 and 19% in 1970. The first growths have pulled far ahead, and the price gaps within each class are now larger than the gaps between classes; the figures are set out in the economics of Bordeaux in charts.

The case for the list as it stands was made at book length by Dewey Markham Jr., the classification's modern historian, in 1997 (in French) and 1998 (in English). His argument is that the brokers' criterion was sounder than it looks. A century of prices records thousands of decisions by buyers spending their own money, a body of evidence that no panel tasting for two weeks could match. The counter-argument is that 1855 fixed that judgment at one date and then shielded it from every later one. Both positions feed into the oldest debate in Bordeaux historiography, over whether the classification measured terroir or helped to create it. The brokers themselves claimed neither: they called their list a sketch drawn from the best sources, and asked that it not be read as official.