Making modern sense of the 1855 Bordeaux classification

Everyone who is anyone in the wine world has had something to say about the official 1855 Bordeaux Classification of the Médoc wines. Mainly, however, this classification is 165 years out of date, and it completely ignores the concept of terroir — it was the wineries (châteaux) that were classified, not the vineyards.

For most wine drinkers, the only current consequence of the 1855 classification is that it ensures that the châteaux wines are no longer affordable, even at the lower levels of the ranking. However, occasionally, some people have had a go at producing an updated version of this classification of the Châteaux, one that might have more relevance than the merely historical significance of the original document.

In this post, I want to draw a simple picture that shows how similar or dissimilar some of these modern classifications are to each other, as well as to the original of 1855.

Background

In 1855 the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce requested the Bordeaux Brokers’ Association to rank and classify the top Haut-Médoc châteaux according to quality, ranking them into five categories. This was done for use at the Exposition Universelle de Paris, the world’s fair of the day.

So, the châteaux were listed in rank order, based on the long-term prices achieved by the various wines, plus some local politicking (the prestige of the wine and the owner, etc). Château Cantemerle was then added to the end of the list in 1856. These wine producers are collectively referred to as the Cru Classé. They were grouped into these five classes:

Premier Crus Classés
Deuxièmes Crus Classés
Troisièmes Crus Classés
Quatrièmes Crus Classés
Cinquièmes Crus Classés

These are usually referred to in English as the First to Fifth Growths, respectively.

If you want to read more about all of this, then Dewey Markham has written a book on the subject, with every conceivable detail of the Bordeaux classifications of wine both before and after 1855 (1855: a History of the Bordeaux Classification. John Wiley & Sons, 1997). See also this review: The 1855 Bordeaux Classification: genius or inertia?

The topic is obviously of some importance to the vignerons of Bordeaux; and indeed “1855” has recently been copyrighted under European law. The classification continues to play a large part in contemporary wine lore, and it seems to be a big determinant of wine prices — eg. the five First Growths sell for 3-6 times the price of the best-regarded Second Growths, even though it is widely acknowledged by wine critics that today they are not much better in quality.

However, it is preposterous to imagine that this ancient ranking could still apply unchanged today. For example, at the time the wines were first classified, the total amount of cultivated land owned by the 61 chateaux was 2,650 hectares — today, they cumulatively own almost 3,500 hectares of vines (a 30% increase). Much of this land has changed hands over the past century, often several times. Notably, Château Gloria is not a Cru Classé (ie. it was not included on the 1855 list), but today its vineyards all come from plots of lands that were originally part of Cru Classé estates.

Similarly, since 1855 the original list has actually increased, from 58 to 61. Three estates, “Léoville”, “Pichon” and “Batailley”, have been split into several châteaux (3, 2 and 2, resspectively), while two originally separate names, “Pouget” and “Pouget-Lassale”, have since been combined into one. Also, the “Dubignon” estate has disappeared, with its vineyards now part of other properties. Château Mouton-Rothschild was moved from Second Growth to First Growth, by presidential decree in 1973.

As a result, modern prices sometimes deviate greatly from the 1855 status. For example, the Fifth Growth Château Pontet-Canet now charges as much as many of the Second Growth châteaux (eg. Punching above its weight class: Chateau Pontet Canet), and Third Growth Château Palmer is more expensive than most Second Growths.

Re-assessing the classification

Naturally, some people have not taken this situation lying down, and they have done something about developing a ranking and classification that has a bit more contemporary relevance.

To re-assess the classification, in the modern world, the simplest thing to do would be to throw the whole thing out and start again. The obvious way to do this would be to create a new classification based on current wine prices, since this was the method originally used by the Bordeaux wine brokers in 1855. However, this is confounded by the fact that the current prices are influenced by the 1855 classification in the first place! So, many modern wine commentators have not done this — they have simply modified the old classification in some subjective way of their own.

One important point to keep in mind is that classifications usually have arbitrary boundaries between the groups. In this case, wine quality varies continuously, and yet the châteaux have been arranged into discrete groups. To a great extent this is arbitrary, because the best wines in one group are not all that different from the worst wines in the next higher group. This has always been the fundamental limitation of any classification system. No-one wants to be the top château in class 3 instead of the bottom château in class 2!

Anyway, I have compiled the data from a number of modern rankings and classifications. These first ones are subjective re-classifications by wine experts (the list in intended to be exhaustive).

1. Alexis Lichine (1979) Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lichine’s classification was first published in 1962, and revised in 1966. Later revisions followed, until the last version was published in 1985, although the final classification was actually dated to 1978.
2. Patrick Dussert-Gerber (1988) Guide des Vins de France 1989. Paris: Albin Michel.
3. Robert M. Parker (1990) Les Vins de Bordeaux. Paris: Solar.
4. Clive Coates (1995) Grands Vins: the Finest Châteaux of Bordeaux and their Wines. University of California Press, Berkeley. This classification has only four groups, not five, and first appeared in 1982. A later classification has only three groups.

The next group consists of attempts to rank the châteaux anew, in their modern context, without direct reference to 1855. In all cases, the rankings are derived from a calculated score of some sort. In each case I have grouped the rankings into five classes, based on gaps in the scores at appropriate spots.

1. Gary M. Thompson and Stephen A. Mutkoski (2011) Reconsidering the 1855 Bordeaux classification of the Médoc and Graves using wine ratings from 1970-2005. Journal of Wine Economics 6: 15-36. The list was based on the quality scores from three expert wine ratings (Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, International Wine Cellar). The châteaux ranking was then derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
2. Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh (1996) Pricing red wines of Médoc vintages from 1949 to 1989 at Christie's auctions. Journal de la Société Statistique de Paris 137: 19-49. Based on auction sales prices from 1980–1992. The châteaux ranking was derived from a regression analysis incorporating a number of relevant factors.
3. (a) Orley Ashenfelter (1988) A new and objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux (based on auction prices, of course!). Liquid Assets 5: 1–9. (b) Orley Ashenfelter (1997) A new objective ranking of the chateaux of Bordeaux. Liquid Assets 13: 1-6. These two lists were based on average auction sale prices from 1985–1988 and 1994–1996, respectively. I averaged the two listed scores for each château.
4. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 Index tracks the trading-exchange prices of 100 top wines (95% of which are from Bordeaux). Rankings of the Bordeaux châteaux, based on average prices over the previous 2-5 years, were produced in 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. I have taken the average of these list prices. Sadly, the 2017 list has only 48 châteaux, not 60, with only five 5th growths listed — the text says “5eme – £250 to £312” but the list has nothing < £274.

A comparison of these classifications

For my data analysis in this post, I have restricted myself to the 5-class classification rather than the châteaux rankings, so that the scale for each château is 1-5 for each of the eight new classifications. There are missing data, because not all of the châteaux were classified by all of the authors.

As I have done for previous posts of this type, I have used a network to visualize the data, with the network being used as a form of exploratory data analysis. This is intended to provide a quick visual overview of the relationships among the classifications.

Technical note. I first used the gower similarity to calculate the similarity of the different classification systems, based on the châteaux classes. This was followed by a neighbor-net analysis to display the between-classification similarities as a phylogenetic network. More information about interpreting these networks can be found at my post: How to interpret splits graphs.

The network for the eight classifications is shown in the graph. Each classification scheme is represented by a dot in the network. Schemes that are closely connected in the network are similar to each other based on their grouping of the various châteaux, and those that are further apart (as measured along the lines) are progressively more different from each other.

The first thing to note is that there are long terminal lines for most of the classifications, with only relatively small edges connecting to each other in the center of the network. This emphasizes that each classification has its own unique features, and that they actually share relatively little in common. Indeed, even a quick look at the data shows that the classifications really only agree on the First and Second Growth châteaux — below that in the ranking, it is a bit of a free-for-all. This lack of uniformity between the classifications makes wine classification look distinctly more like an art than a science.

Anyway, the “spider-web” of lines in the center of the network does, indeed, tell us some things.

First, the Ashenfelter and Vittorio classifications are the most similar in the network. This is not unexpected, because they were based on auction prices over roughly the same periods of time.

The Dussert-Gerber classification has some things in common with both the Parker and the Coates classifications, but apparently somewhat different things. These are subjective classifications, remember.

The Thompson and Liv-ex classifications also share some things in common, which may seem a bit odd, since they are based on different criteria (quality scores versus prices, respectively). However, the other auction-price-based classifications (Ashenfelter and Vittorio) come from a couple of decades earlier than the Liv-ex prices, which presumably accounts for its distinction from them.

Finally, all of the classifications are very different from them 1855 one, but the two classifications that share the most with it are the ones from Lichine and Liv-ex, with Lichine’s actually being slightly closer. This was Lichine’s stated objective: a marriage of the old and the new. He seems to have achieved that; but more recent classifiers think that the Bordeaux classification needs more radical re-arrangement.

Conclusion

In this post, I have restricted myself to the classification — that is, the five groups. However, the original 1855 list was also a ranking, and many of the modern re-assessments also provide ranks. This may actually be more relevant to modern wine drinkers than are the groupings, and so I will look at these rankings in a future post.