The Bordeaux 1855 classification

The 1855 classification is a price list. Napoleon III wanted France's best wines ranked for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, so Bordeaux's brokers did the fastest honest thing available: they sorted the Médoc's châteaux by reputation and by what their wine had been trading for, then drew five lines through the result.

Those five “growths” are still on labels 170 years later and still move prices. What they rank is the estate, not the vineyard, and the list has been altered exactly twice since it was written.

The five growths

Sixty-one red estates in total. All of them may print Grand Cru Classé en 1855 on the bottle, which is the single most useful thing to know here: the phrase tells you the château is on the list, not which of the five rungs it stands on.

Two changes in 170 years

Cantemerle was added as a fifth growth in 1856, having been left off. In 1973, after decades of lobbying, Mouton Rothschild was raised from second growth to first. That is the entire revision history. An estate that was mediocre in 1855 and brilliant now sits exactly where its great-great-grandfather's prices put it.

What the list ignores

Haut-Brion is the only classified estate outside the Médoc. It sits in Graves, and was included because it was already too famous to leave out. Sweet wine got a separate three-tier list the same year, with Château d'Yquem alone at the summit as Premier Cru Supérieur.

The whole Right Bank was ignored. Pomerol still has no classification of any kind, which is why Pétrus and Le Pin — two of the most expensive wines on earth — are technically unclassified, and why Right Bank Bordeaux built its reputation entirely without one.

Crus Bourgeois: the list that gets rewritten

Below the 1855 estates sits a separate Médoc classification that is rewritten every five years, and unlike 1855 it demotes. The 2020 edition named 249 châteaux in three tiers — 14 Crus Bourgeois Exceptionnels, 56 Crus Bourgeois Supérieurs and 179 Crus Bourgeois — with the ranking attaching to the wine from the 2018 vintage onwards rather than to the estate for ever. Check which edition a bottle is claiming before you pay for the words.

For anyone buying Left Bank Bordeaux to drink rather than to store, this is the more informative list of the two, simply because it reflects this century rather than the 1850s.

So is a Second Growth better than a Fifth?

On paper, yes. In the shop, often not. A handful of second growths — Léoville-Las-Cases, Pichon Comtesse, Cos d'Estournel, Montrose, Ducru-Beaucaillou — trade close to first growth money and have done for years, while several fifths overdeliver quietly. My rule when spending real money: vintage and estate beat tier. A fifth growth from a strong year is a better bottle than a second from a weak one, and the Cabernet Sauvignon in it will tell you so within a glass.