Wine · Terminology

Cru Classé

A classified growth — most famously the 61 Médoc châteaux ranked in five tiers in 1855.

Cru Classé — "classified growth" — means an estate included in one of Bordeaux's official classifications. The famous one is the 1855 Médoc classification, drawn up for the Paris Exposition Universelle by ranking châteaux according to the prices their wines had been fetching, and barely amended since.

It ranks estates, not vineyards — the opposite of Burgundy's approach. A château can buy land, replant, change hands entirely, and keep its rank.

In practice

  • The 1855 list covers 61 red estates in five tiers, from Premier to Cinquième Cru, plus the Sauternes classification of 27 sweet-wine châteaux.
  • Only two changes since: Cantemerle's addition in 1856, and Mouton Rothschild's promotion to First Growth in 1973.
  • Separate systems exist for Graves (1953/59), Saint-Émilion (1955, revised roughly decennially) and Cru Bourgeois (relaunched 2020).
  • Pomerol has no classification at all — Pétrus needs none.

Where you'll meet it

  • Any Left Bank Bordeaux label, where the rank is printed proudly.
  • En primeur pricing, which still tracks the 1855 hierarchy loosely.
  • Exam questions, which love the exceptions more than the list.

The 1855 tiers

Tier Count Examples
Premier Cru 5 Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion, Mouton (1973)
Deuxième Cru 14 Cos d'Estournel, Léoville-Las Cases, Ducru-Beaucaillou
Troisième Cru 14 Palmer, Calon-Ségur, Giscours
Quatrième Cru 10 Talbot, Beychevelle, Saint-Pierre
Cinquième Cru 18 Lynch-Bages, Pontet-Canet, Grand-Puy-Lacoste

Every one is in the Médoc except Haut-Brion, which is in Graves and was included because its reputation made omission impossible.

Does the 1855 list still hold?

Partly. It was a snapshot of 1855 market prices, and 170 years of investment, neglect, replanting and ownership change have scrambled it. Several Second Growths (Léoville-Las Cases, Cos d'Estournel) trade at First Growth-adjacent prices; several Fifths (Lynch-Bages, Pontet-Canet) outperform Thirds routinely; and a few classified estates are frankly coasting.

The super seconds — an unofficial term for the best Second Growths — exist precisely because the market corrected what the classification would not.

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