The 1855 Classification of Bordeaux

Bordeaux didn’t rank its wines by quality in 1855 — it ranked them by price. Napoleon III wanted a showpiece for the Exposition Universelle de Paris, and the region’s wine brokers, the courtiers, built the list the only way they trusted: by what each château’s wine had fetched at market over the preceding decades. No tasting panel convened. No terroir was surveyed. What emerged from that ledger has outlasted the empire that ordered it, survived two world wars and phylloxera, and still sets the commercial pecking order for the most famous wines on earth — almost entirely unchanged and almost entirely uncorrected.

How a Price List Became Law

The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce commissioned the ranking at the Emperor’s request, and the courtiers who compiled it worked from trading records, not barrel samples. Sixty châteaux from the Médoc — plus one outlier from Graves, Château Haut-Brion, whose reputation was too large to leave off — were sorted into five tiers: First through Fifth Growth. A separate, parallel classification ranked the sweet wines of Sauternes and Barsac the same way. Both lists were meant as a one-time exhibition aid. Neither has ever been seriously rewritten.

Red Wines: First Growth — Premier Cru

Mouton Rothschild is listed here because it belongs here today — it wasn’t a First Growth in 1855. See below.

Red Wines: Second Growth — Deuxième Cru

Red Wines: Third Growth — Troisième Cru

Red Wines: Fourth Growth — Quatrième Cru

Red Wines: Fifth Growth — Cinquième Cru

61 wines from 60 châteaux across five tiers — the total holds because Pichon Longueville was later split into two estates, Baron and Comtesse de Lalande, both of which kept Second Growth status.

Sauternes and Barsac: The Sweet Wine Classification

Bordeaux ran a second, parallel ranking the same year for its botrytized sweet wines, with its own top tier reserved for a single château.

Premier Cru Supérieur

Premiers Crus

Deuxièmes Crus

27 estates in total. Several — Doisy, Romer, Lamothe — split into today’s separate châteaux long after 1855, each inheriting the original rank.

The Only Change Anyone Ever Made

In 170 years, the classification has been amended exactly once. Château Mouton Rothschild spent a century as the strongest Second Growth in Bordeaux, and its owner, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, spent decades lobbying to have that fixed. In 1973, under Agriculture Minister Jacques Chirac, it finally was: Mouton became the fifth First Growth, the only promotion in the classification’s history. Its motto since has been blunt about the wait — “Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Mouton suis” (“First, I cannot be; second, I do not deign to be; I am Mouton”).

The other adjustment barely counts as one. Château Cantemerle was left off the initial 1855 list by apparent oversight and added as a Fifth Growth the following year. Château Dubignon, a minor Third Growth, was later absorbed into neighboring Malescot St. Exupéry and simply stopped existing as a separate wine. Beyond that: nothing. No château has ever been demoted.

What the 1855 Classification Doesn’t Cover

It’s a Médoc-and-Sauternes document, not a Bordeaux-wide one — a detail worth stating plainly, because it trips people up constantly. Graves got its own classification in 1953, revised in 1959. Saint-Émilion has been classified separately since 1955, and unlike the Médoc’s list, it’s actually revised on a rolling basis, complete with promotions, demotions, and periodic lawsuits from châteaux that lost rank. Pomerol, home to Château Pétrus, has never been officially classified at all — its reputation runs entirely on market consensus, built with no ranking to lean on.

Why a Price List From an Empire Still Runs the Market

The 1855 Classification never claimed to measure quality — it measured what courtiers could get for a barrel in the 1840s and 50s, and froze that number into a hierarchy. Winemaking has changed beyond recognition since then: some Fifth Growths now farm and vinify at a level several Second and Third Growths don’t bother matching, and blind tastings have embarrassed the ranking more than once. None of it has moved a single château up or down. En primeur pricing, critic attention, and collector demand still track first to growth, because the label is the asset — the reputation compounds whether or not the wine in a given vintage earns it that year.