Bordeaux – What's 1855 got to do with it?

There are a lot of differences between France’s two most prestigious wine regions, Burgundy and Bordeaux, but the biggest one may be how each region classifies its wines. Burgundy is fairly simple. Ascending in quality (and price) you have regional wines, village level wines, premier cru wines, and finally and most expensively, grand cru wines. (Yes, Chablis has its own system, but we’ll set that aside for now). 
 
Bordeaux wines are classified through several distinct systems, each reflecting the region’s history, diverse terroirs and prices. The most famous is the 1855 Classification, established under Napoleon III. It came about because Napoleon wanted to show off the best French wines at the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris (essentially an early version of the World Fair). The question was how to prioritize among the thousands of producers. The answer was to create a ranking system of five classes, called growths. And while the list reflected history and terroir, what really drove the ranking was the price of the wines. The determination calculated the average price of a chateaux’s wine between 1815 and 1855. 
 
The final list included 61 Bordeaux chateaux from the Medoc region.* There were five first growths, 14 second growths, 14 third growths, 10 fourth growths and 18 fifth growths. Probably the most amazing thing about the 1855 Classification is that there have been only three changes in the rankings since 1855. 
 
Of course, changes in vineyard ownership and winemaking techniques, among other things, have shaken things up a bit. There are examples of third growths selling for more than second growths and even a fifth growth going for more than a second growth, but most wine experts still think the rankings hold. 
 
The lesson here is that despite its growth ranking, there are lots of bargains to be had when looking for Bordeaux wines. 
 
*Other wine regions, even within Bordeaux, were not yet seen as complex enough to compete. Today, Bordeaux classifications include the Saint-Émilion Grand Cru Classé, introduced in 1955 and revised every ten years, the Graves Classification of 1959 and the Cru Bourgeois classification, which was formalized in 1932 and updated in 2003 and recognizes high-quality wines from the Médoc that were not included in the 1855 Classification.