Themes

One Region, Four Rankings: Every Bordeaux Classification, Compared

1855, Graves, Saint-Émilion, Crus Bourgeois — what each Bordeaux classification ranks, how it revises, and why the revisable ones keep ending up in court.

Bordeaux does not have a classification. It has four — plus one famous refusal. The 1855 ranking of the Médoc and Sauternes, the Graves list of 1953–1959, the Saint-Émilion classification of 1955 and the Crus Bourgeois of the Médoc were all built to answer the same question — which estates are the best? — and each answered it differently. They disagree on what is being ranked (a market price, a piece of land, an estate, a wine in the bottle), on who does the ranking, and above all on whether the answer may ever change. Read side by side, they amount to a natural experiment in how to design a hierarchy. The experiment has produced one consistent result: every Bordeaux classification that allows revision has, at some point, been dragged into court.

1855: the frozen benchmark

The oldest and most famous of the four needs only a brief summary here, because it has an article of its own. Commissioned for the Exposition Universelle of 1855 at the request of Napoleon III's administration, drawn up by Bordeaux's wine brokers on the basis of long-run market prices, it ranked the red wines of the Médoc (plus Haut-Brion in the Graves) into five tiers of crus classés, and the sweet whites of Sauternes and Barsac into their own hierarchy crowned by Yquem.

Two features matter for the comparison. First, the 1855 ranking classified prices — decades of them — rather than soils or cellars; it was a snapshot of the market's own verdict. Second, it froze. In more than a century and a half it has admitted exactly one substantive change: the promotion of Château Mouton Rothschild from second to first growth in 1973, after four decades of lobbying. Whatever else may be said of the 1855 classification, no court has ever struck it down — there is no procedure to litigate, because there is no revision to contest.

Graves, 1953–1959: rank without hierarchy

The Graves, historic cradle of Bordeaux's vineyard, was left out of the 1855 exercise apart from Haut-Brion. Its own classification came a century later and took the opposite design decision on almost every point. Drawn up in 1953 by a jury appointed by the INAO (the national appellations institute) and approved by the Minister of Agriculture that August, then completed by a final decree in February 1959, it names sixteen estates — classified for their red wine, their white wine, or both — with no internal hierarchy at all. An estate is a cru classé de Graves or it is nothing; there are no firsts and seconds. Haut-Brion appears here too, the only property ranked in two classifications at once.

The list has never been revised since 1959. History then played a trick on its geography: when the Pessac-Léognan appellation was created in 1987 for the northern Graves, every one of the sixteen classified estates fell inside it — leaving the appellation named Graves with a classification whose members are all, today, labelled Pessac-Léognan. Like 1855, the Graves list has never seen a courtroom. Like 1855, it purchased that peace with immobility.

Saint-Émilion: the classification that dared to revise

Saint-Émilion, on the right bank of the Dordogne, watched the Médoc trade on its 1855 ranking for a century before creating its own in 1955 — and built in the feature every other classification lacked: planned revision, roughly every decade (editions followed in 1969, 1986, 1996, 2006, 2012 and 2022). It is also the only classification embedded in appellation law itself, run under the authority of the INAO, with the mentions grand cru classé and premier grand cru classé (the latter split into "A" and "B") attached to named estates and their vineyard parcels. On paper it is the most rational of the four systems: a living hierarchy, periodically re-examined by the State. In practice, revision is where the lawsuits live.

The 2006 edition demonstrated it first. Demoted châteaux sued; a Bordeaux administrative tribunal suspended the classification in March 2007; the Conseil d'État reinstated it that November; and on 1 July 2008 the tribunal annulled it outright, ruling that the tasting procedure had not been impartial. The government extended the 1996 classification by emergency decree to cover the 2006–2009 vintages, and in May 2009 parliament passed a law allowing the châteaux promoted in 2006 to keep their new rank — a classification, in effect, patched together from a court ruling, a decree and a statute.

The 2012 edition was rebuilt to be litigation-proof, with independent commissioners from outside the region working under INAO oversight. It classified 82 estates — 64 grands crus classés and 18 premiers grands crus classés, with Château Angélus and Château Pavie promoted to rank "A" alongside Ausone and Cheval Blanc. Three demoted or refused properties (Croque-Michotte, Corbin-Michotte, La Tour du Pin Figeac) sued anyway; the Bordeaux administrative tribunal upheld the classification in December 2015. But a parallel criminal case ran for years longer, and in October 2021 the Bordeaux criminal court convicted Hubert de Boüard — co-owner of Angélus, then simultaneously a member of the INAO's national committee and a consultant to estates under review — of prise illégale d'intérêts (unlawful conflict of interest) in the 2012 process, fining him €60,000, €20,000 of it suspended; his co-defendant Philippe Castéja was acquitted, and the court found no proof the demotions themselves had resulted.

By then the top of the pyramid had voted with its feet. In July 2021 Cheval Blanc and Ausone — "A"-ranked since the beginning — withdrew from the forthcoming classification, arguing that its criteria (which weigh reputation, distribution and wine tourism alongside terroir and tasting) had strayed too far from the estate, the vineyard and the wine. Angélus followed in January 2022. The 2022 edition went ahead without them: 85 classified estates, 71 grands crus classés and 14 premiers, with Pavie and the newly promoted Figeac alone at rank "A". The one classification designed to evolve had, in a decade, produced an annulment, a statute, a criminal conviction and the defection of three of its four figureheads.

Crus Bourgeois: the middle class, four times remade

Below the crus classés, the Médoc's broad middle tier has its own hierarchy — and the most turbulent institutional history of all. The first Crus Bourgeois list, drawn up in 1932 by Bordeaux's brokers under the aegis of the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Agriculture, named 444 estates but was never officially ratified. An official classification finally came in 2003: 247 properties in three tiers (9 Exceptionnels, 87 Supérieurs, 151 Crus Bourgeois). Excluded estates sued, and in February 2007 the Bordeaux administrative appeal court annulled the whole edifice as "tainted with illegality" — several jurors had judged a category in which they owned properties. For a time the very words "cru bourgeois" were banned from labels.

The 2010 relaunch rebuilt the system on the opposite principle: a single level, awarded annually, and to a wine rather than a château — a vintage-by-vintage quality mark verified by an independent body, first applied to the 2008 vintage (243 wines). Only in 2020 did the three-tier, estate-level classification return, now valid for five years at a time: 249 châteaux (179 Crus Bourgeois, 56 Supérieurs, 14 Exceptionnels). The first renewal, in February 2025, confirmed the mechanism — and showed its bite, with the total falling to 170 estates while the top tier held at 14. In ninety years the Crus Bourgeois have thus been a broker's list, an annulled classification, an annual label and a quinquennial ranking: a one-family history of every way Bordeaux has tried to certify quality.

Pomerol: the power of no ranking

And then there is Pomerol. The tiny appellation on the right bank — whose rise is part of the wider Libournais story — has never classified anything. No tiers, no decree, no jury: Petrus, Le Pin, Lafleur and their neighbours trade at prices matching or exceeding the first growths of the Médoc on reputation alone. Pomerol's late arrival to fame — its international standing dates essentially from the second half of the twentieth century — meant it missed the classifying eras, and its producers have never sought to repair the omission. It is the control group of the Bordeaux experiment: proof that in a market this mature, the hierarchy can live entirely in the price list.

Side by side

What the comparison teaches

Line the four systems up and the trade-off is stark. The classifications that never change — 1855 and Graves — have never been successfully challenged, but at the price of describing the Bordeaux of another century. The classifications that do change — Saint-Émilion and the Crus Bourgeois — stay current, but every revision creates losers with lawyers: both have had an entire edition annulled by a court, and Saint-Émilion has added a criminal conviction and the secession of its most famous names. Litigation is not an accident befalling Bordeaux's rankings; it is the structural cost of making them revisable, in a region where a line on a list moves land values.

Beneath the procedure lies the older question of what a ranking measures in the first place — the brokers of 1855 said the market, Saint-Émilion's decrees say the land and the estate together, Pomerol says nothing at all. That is the terroir debate in institutional form, and it has an article of its own.