The Greatest Snub in History
In 1855, Napoleon III (nephew of the more famous Napoleon Bonaparte) ordered that the great vineyards of Bordeaux be ranked, as a guide to foreign visitors to the Paris Exhibition. This gave rise the classification system that is still in use today. Many of Bordeaux’s vineyards proudly declare the words ‘Grand Cru Classé en 1855’ on their signage and bottles as a sign of their superior status among winemakers.
The wine brokers in charge of producing the classification system looked to the market prices for Bordeaux wines in 1855 and the preceding century to classify the vineyards into five ‘Grand Cru’ categories—in the words of Jancis Robinson, “something of a football league system for chateaux”—from First Growth (being the best of the best) down to Fifth Growth. Each vineyard was classified individually by the type of wine produced yielding two lists, one for white and one for red. All of the vineyards that were classified for their red wines were in the region of Bordeaux known as the ‘Medoc’, which sits on the southern side of the massive Gironde estuary that splits the Bordeaux wine growing region down the middle. Regions on the north side such as the famous St Emillion appellation, have since developed their own classification system. The Medoc is known for its fairytale chateaux and the famous villages of ‘Margaux’, ‘Pauillac’ and ‘St Estephe’.
There was, however, one exception to the Medoc’s dominance in the 1855 classification: Chateau Haut-Brion, which is found in Graves region immediately to the south of the Medoc and now literally in the city of Bordeaux. Vineyards that did not make it into the classification system or that have opened since 1855 are now classified as ‘Cru Bourgeois’ or ‘Cru Artisan’ (more on this in ‘The Last Artisan in Pauillac’).
The classification system has since been used to determine the market prices of almost all of the wine to come out of Bordeaux since then. For better or for worse, the 1855 Bordeaux classification is set in stone and so for one hundred and fifty years it has never been changed—except once. This is what happened.
There were four vineyards classified as ‘First Growth, Grand Cru Classé’ in 1855. And all of them are as famous as Bordeaux itself: Chateau Lafite, Chateau Latour, Chateau Margaux and Chateau Haut-Brion. Every bottle produced by these vineyards is sought after: in bad vintages (when there is too much rainfall, cool weather or a bad harvest) their wines can fetch €500-800 a bottle, and in a good vintages they can easily be in the thousands. Being a ‘premier cru’ vineyard then is big business.
In 1855 there was a fifth vineyard that could command the same prices and claim the same reputation for producing top quality wines as these famous four: Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. Quite why this chateau was not included as a fist growth is a mystery lost to history. But the family, which to this day still owns the famous winery, has always maintained that the reason was simple and perhaps unsurprising. Chateau Mouton-Rothschild was owned by an Englishman.
Whatever the reason was, it was a snub that would ring down the centuries. Subsequent generations of the Rothschild family lobbied fiercely to have the classification changed and at last in 1973 it finally was. The one and only time the 1855 Bordeaux classification has been tampered with and the exclusive club and the top of French wine making grew a little larger from four to five.