Ivory Cutlery’s Day Off – We Need To Talk About Bordeaux

Greetings pop pickers (from the hot and steamy Côte d’Azur on the stunning Mediterranean coastline of southeastern France) and please be welcome to tonight’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday and yet another of our groin-polished googlies from the gasworks end of contemporary culture.

Tonight, dear reader, as we respectfully mark both Pride Month and International Fairy Day (I kid you not), Ivory Cutlery (currently sore of buttock, back and bone) will once again be taking the night off.

I’m currently labouring on the construction of a rather large live event on a sun-scorched beach in Cannes and, as a result, have neither the time nor energy for any of my usual detailed, rigorous, fact-checked, Puffin-quality research.*

*a transparent tissue of lies – all the hard work is done by Grok

Because of this, tonight’s missive will be a shoddy and shambolic affair; a puerile stream of consciousness, written rapidly in a succession of French bars, restaurants and coffee shops. So tonight, dear reader, we shall consider the subject of Bordeaux wine and its bemusing and unnecessarily complex system of classification.

The inspiration for this article was an informative post-work boozing session from a few days ago, when I found myself in an alcohol-fuelled conversation with a local sommelier who was keen to express his fears and concerns with regard to the Bordeaux en primeur system.

For the uninitiated, en primeur is simply a wine futures system. It’s the long established method of purchasing wine before it is bottled; while it’s still in bulk storage, maturing quietly in barrels and storage tanks, still quite possibly years from release to your average punter. This wine futures system originated in Bordeaux and allows investors, buyers, distributors and collectors to secure wines at initial release prices that would normally be below the price charged when the wine, after a suitable period of maturation, is eventually bottled and released.

The primary concern of my sommelier chum seemed to be that the Bordeaux en primeur system is currently in deep doo-doo. Years of falling demand, oversupply and inflated prices have, he claimed, left many a fine and noble château struggling to flog their gargle; and as a result, he now fears an industry damaging collapse of the traditional Bordeaux en primeur system is a distinct and worrying possibility.

Apparently, because buyers are currently able to purchase a wide variety of top-notch, fully-aged and, crucially, entirely ready-to-drink vintages (for significantly less than the cost of new vintages that would still need to be stored and aged for at least a few years), the new wines are simply not selling. Add in a general background of waning enthusiasm for Bordeaux wines across key international markets (Europe, US and China) and my wine-bothering chum was deeply concerned that producers may soon resort to digging up vines and significantly reducing production – a prospect that seemed to fill him with existential horror (not me though – I’ve always been perfectly happy with a good quality bottle of shelf-aged meths).

Anyway, after a couple of bottles of jolly decent Crus Bourgeois du Médoc Exceptionnel (more on that later) my interlocutor cheered up a bit and I took the opportunity to ask if he could perhaps explain the labyrinthine (to me at least) system of wine classification that is currently used in Bordeaux? Happily, this conversational gambit on my part was right up his particular French alley and it promptly generated a prolonged and informative chat – one that now forms the basis of this article.

My lifelong confusion about Bordeaux classification stems from the fact that the wine region around Bordeaux (on the left and right bank of the Gironde estuary in south-west France) is enormous, with well over 100,000 hectares of vineyard, around 5,500 producers and about 60 appellations (officially defined wine regions). Overlay this with multiple wine classification systems (some of which seem to contradict each other) and you can understand my prolonged confusion. Additionally, some of these systems appear to change with regularity, while others have been set in stone (more or less) for almost two hundred years. But fear not, dear reader – all will be explained.

Our tale begins in 1855 with a spot of attempted (and entirely typical) French one-upmanship, via the first Great Exposition of Paris, under the glorious and beneficent rule of Napoleon III – First President of the French Second Republic, Creator of the Second French Empire, Emperor & last monarch of France – pretty decent job title, tha’. I bet he had loads of medals on his chest.

The Great Exposition was a world’s fair, to be held on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. This was the first of ten major expositions that were held in the city between 1855 and the Second World War. The inaugural 1855 event followed London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 and attempted to upstage London’s magnificent and innovative Crystal Palace with the clearly derivative (and probably garlic-stained) Paris Palais de l’Industrie.

Anyway, as part of this great exhibition, the organisers asked the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce to provide a ranked list of the very bestest and most slurpiest of their wines to show off to the rest of the world. The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce passed the task to the region’s wine brokers, who simply ranked producers by their selling price, arguing the most expensive wines were clearly the best. The result of this fiscal filtering was a list of around 60 red wines, which they divided up into five tiers called Growths (Crus). All were Left Bank wines*, most from the Médoc, with just one from the Graves region.

*The Left Bank (west of the river with gravelly soils) is Cab Sav country and home to appellations like the Médoc, Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Margaux and Graves; the Right Bank (east of the river with clay and limestone soils) is Merlot country and home to Saint-Émilion and Pomerol.

At the very top of the 1855 list sit the First Growths (Premiers Crus). Originally there were just four** names in the Premier Cru category: Margaux, Lafite, Latour and Haut-Brion. Below the First Growths came the Second Growth, followed (unsurprisingly) by the Third, Fourth, and Fifth.

**In 1973, Château Mouton Rothschild was promoted from Second to First Growth status

The 1855 Classification also ranked the sweet white wines of Barsac and Sauternes into three tiers: Premier Cru Supérieur (only one producer, Château d’Yquem, made the cut) with eleven Premiers Crus in the second tier and fifteen Deuxièmes Crus below that.

And that’s pretty much how the original 1855 system has remained. My sommelier chum views the rigid and unchanging nature of this classification system as it greatest flaw, as it has allowed some very big and profitable names to cheerfully coast along on rank and reputation alone, often at the cost of quality, but never (until recently) at the cost of price or profit.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the wine producing regions excluded from the 1855 list were somewhat peeved by all this left bank bias, decided to issue a firm “ya boo sucks” to the left bankers and set up their own system of classification. Case in point – the right bank Saint-Emilion classification system.

The Saint-Émilion crew created their own classification system in 1955 and decided to make it a far more dynamic process. As a result, it is revised and reviewed at roughly ten year intervals, with full-on promotion and relegation from the system’s three divisions (that are actually called tiers):

Premier League – Premier Grand Cru Classé A

Championship – Premier Grand Cru Classé B

League One (the old third division) – Grand Cru Classé

Please note: Wendyball references and allusions are allowed because the 2026 FIFA World Wendyball Cup is currently in progress.

In the latest version (the seventh edition, issued in 2022) only two châteaux made the A grade, twelve made the B grade and there are 71 bog standard Grands Crus that have to resign themselves to propping up the bottom of the Saint-Émilion table.

The 2022 revision caused quite the kerfuffle when it was released (not an unusual occurrence for team Saint-Émilion, who often seem end up in court when they reorganise their league tables or relegate a château) as it all seemed to go a bit woke. Instead of focusing on just wine quality, the new ranking system included scores for criteria such as ethical marketing, tourism, architectural standards and social media status. This went down like a cut crystal glass of cold sick with many of the producers and three of the top Premier Grand Cru Classé A estates (Cheval Blanc, Ausone and Angélus) were simply not ‘avin’ it. They huffed and puffed for a bit, but eventually said, in effect, on yer onion bike sunshine, threw their toys out of the pram and walked away from the Saint-Emilion classification system.

Next up, we’ll take a look the 1959 Graves classification system (actually drawn up in 1953, but revised and re-launched, after much bickering, in 1959). Graves is apparently the oldest fine wine region in Bordeaux. However, in 1855, only Haut-Brion made the cut for the original Bordeaux classification system. So, in response, Graves eventually drew up its own classification system – and what a nice simple system it is – just one level: Grand Cru Classé de Graves, covering both red and white wines. Currently, just 16 châteaux make the grade and the Graves classification has barely changed since its original inception.

And so we arrive at the Crus Bourgeois du Médoc. The classification which, according to my sommelier chum, produces some of the greatest wine bargains in all of Bordeaux. Back in 1855, only 60 of the hundreds of Médoc châteaux made the cut for the original list. So, in 1932, the Crus Bourgeois du Médoc classification system was launched. It contains 170 estates, eight appellations and just three tiers: Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel (14 châteaux), Cru Bourgeois Supérieur (36 châteaux) and the bog standard Cru Bourgeois (120 châteaux).

To illustrate my interlocutors point that this region produces some serious red wine bargains, he selected – and we consumed – two bottles of Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel. Both were reasonably priced and both were truly excellent (although my head probably begged to differ when I had to arise for my labours at 0430 the following morning).

There is in fact a fourth and least-known Medoc classification: the Crus Artisans du Médoc. This system represents a collection of small estates, often family run, with no corporate ownership, selling directly to the public and local businesses in their area. The most recent edition (2023) recognizes just 31 estates and you’ll rarely find these wines outside of the properties themselves. My sommelier chum informs me they can range, in terms of quality, from sublime to paint stripper.

Finally, Pomerol. The teeny, tiny right bank appellation that is home to the seriously wallet-bothering Château Pétrus and Château Le Pin, both of whom can charge thousands of euros a bottle. Officially, these top-notch gargles have absolutely no rank in the various official Bordeaux classification systems. Pomerol’s producers refuse to create a hierarchy, believing such nonsense to be beneath them, and are entirely content to let their wines speak for themselves.

As an aside. I once knew a Hell’s Angel who owned a bottle of Château Pétrus. She claimed her grandfather’s unit had “liberated” several cases during WWII. How true that story is, I couldn’t say. But the bottle of Pétrus was certainly real enough. She was apparently saving it for a major birthday, but sadly never got to taste it. She asked her niece to house-sit while she was on holiday and the young lass and her boyfriend opened the Pétrus and drank the lot – much, as you might imagine, to the owner’s deeply abiding dismay. So what did a 1930’s bottle of Château Pétrus taste like? Well, apparently, it was a bit thick and rich and not very sweet, so they watered it down with lemonade. Ah well.