Dusting off the 1855 debate
By Howard G. GoldbergThe Bordelais love to remind outsiders that Bordeaux is France's most beautiful 18th-century city. The stately shuttered buildings curving along the Garonne River, today newly scrubbed to a tawny glow, bustled with wine traders during a historic moment: the creation of the 1855 classification of Médoc châteaux. Virtually preserved in amber, the classification, at 150 this year, embodies France's love affair with rigid systems that perpetuate its notions of culinary - indeed cultural - superiority. Think Appellation Contrôlée. Think Michelin restaurant ratings. Think Académie Française, which has guarded the purity of the French language against invasive barbarisms - virtually any foreign words - since 1635.
The Médoc anniversary provides grounds to revive, once again, a hoary but always timely question about this nearly immutable, so-very-Gallic hierarchy, which has crowned claret, or at least the estates that produce it, as the royalty of red wine: Does it, too, need a scrubbing? Yes. But it would be easier to mount a ladder and polish or rearrange the stars in the firmament.
In the one-and-a-half centuries since Emperor Napoleon III asked the Bordeaux chamber of commerce to formulate a classification of the leading Bordeaux wines for the Exposition Universelle de Paris, its sanctity has been breached only twice. Château Cantemerle was tacked on months after the list was submitted; then 118 years passed before the next change.
Three of the four First Growths (Premiers Crus) of the time - Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux - lay in the Médoc, north of the city of Bordeaux, and the other, Haut-Brion, in Graves, to the southwest. Mouton-Rothschild, named Brane-Mouton when bought by Nathaniel Rothschild in 1853, and still being transformed two years later, was deemed a Second Growth.
After 20-year-old Baron Philippe de Rothschild took the reins of Mouton-Rothschild in 1922, he vowed to seek reclassification for the Pauillac property as a First Growth. It took two decades of lobbying, cajoling and pressuring, but in 1973 he succeeded. Hence his motto: "First I am, Second I was, Mouton does not change."
The system of 61 First through Fifth Growths was drawn up not by grape growers or winemakers but by brokers. They based their judgments, sensibly, on prices that the wines had been fetching on the Bordeaux market. The prices, naturally, were rooted in quality and reputation.
Although American English is comfortable with the neutral phrase "classified growths," the British prefer "classed growths," a straightforward translation of cru classé. (A cru is a vineyard.) "Growth" is a clumsy noun in English, and to the American ear "classed growth" sounds vaguely pretentious, but I prefer that usage, because it poetically marries the British awareness of class with French snobbish discrimination.
Newcomers to claret automatically equate the original pecking order with contemporary quality. They might heed skeptical opinions, including that of Hugh Johnson, the eminent British critic, who wrote: "Apart from the First Growths, the five classes of 1855 are now hopelessly jumbled in quality, with some Second Growths making wine of Fifth-Growth level and vice versa. They also overlap in quality with the top Crus Bourgeois."
Almost all 61 châteaux have changed ownership since 1855; some have virtually disappeared; others have been divided; land has been sold off; fortunes have waxed and waned.
Recommendations for overhauling the system have been advanced, notably by Alexis Lichine, the late wine author and proprietor of Prieuré-Lichine, a Fourth Growth. His proposal ran aground, as others in the future probably would, because of the 1855 establishment's political muscle, prosperity and prospects, social status, market clout, professional and personal prestige and conservatism.
In the 1960s, Bordeaux brokers recommended a revision of the classification. The five tiers would be dropped to three; 18 châteaux would be discarded and 13 new ones added. "The reaction was explosive outrage," Lichine wrote. "Château owners demoted or entirely deleted... condemned the ranking as malicious, incompetent and unjust."
I share the view of my friend Peter M. F. Sichel, the owner of Fourcas-Hosten, a Cru Bourgeois Supérieur in Listrac: "The old system has held up pretty well, though any objective examination would not assign, in a number of cases, the same numerical classification to the classified growths today.
"By and large, the classified growths are still the best wines, with very few exceptions, made in the Médoc, as they were in 1855," Sichel says. "There should also be a periodic reassessment of the classifications, to enable some Cru Bourgeois to move up, and classified wines that have deteriorated to move out."
The great producers, feasting on good vintages and technology that can offset poor ones, entertain lavishly and are masterly salesmen. But they represent only about 5 percent of production in Bordeaux, France's largest wine region. Although the panache of their mansions, impeccable lawns and manicured vineyards rub off on lesser Bordeaux producers, today hundreds of small growers and properties, who are unable to sell their wine and pay their bills, are in deepening trouble because of a crisis enveloping France's entire wine economy.
But you will not find worried, even desperate, Bordelais in Bordeaux Châteaux: A History of the Grands Crus Classés 1855-2005 (Flammarion, Paris, 2004, $60), a lavish coffee-table anniversary volume that in color photographs and English text presents profiles of all the estates. It is an indispensable addition to every Bordeaux aficionado's library. Dewey Markham, Jr., author of a history of the classification, says realistically in an introductory essay, "Today, the classification's greatest role is as a promotional tool, not only for the properties it includes, but for the greater Bordeaux area."
In America, except for the names of the First Growths and a handful of the so-called Super Seconds - Cos d'Estournel, Ducru-Beaucaillou, Léoville-Las-Cases, Pichon-Longueville-Lalande, Pichon-Longueville - the 1855 totem seems noticed only by consumers who deconstruct labels. (The Super Seconds have virtually banged their way into the top tier by demanding and getting First Growth prices.)
Who has ever seen a customer belly up to a counter in emporiums like Wally's in Los Angeles or Zachys in Scarsdale, New York, and ask, "What Cinquièmes Crus do you carry?" Besides, who would associate the delicious reds of, say, Lynch-Bages with its current misplacement in the Fifth Growths?
Americans buy by the numbers - critics' numbers. So, for the next 150 years, scholars can investigate whether, or to what degree, the vertical numerical structure and spirit of the top-down 1855 classification has promoted the top-down 100-point grading system perpetuated by our most famous market-moving claret lover, Robert M. Parker, Jr.
Howard G. Goldberg, who contributes wine columns to The New York Times, is author of All About Wine Cellars, a paperback that is part of The Complete Wine Cellar System kit (Running Press).