About Bordeaux Reviews

Bordeaux Reviews is an independent publication about the wines of Bordeaux, written and edited from Miami by Antonio "Guto" Assumpção. It is made for the people who carry this corner of France around in their heads: those who drink Bordeaux, hunt for it, cellar it, study it, and argue about it late into the evening, and who want to understand what is really in the glass and why it earns the fuss.

The writing here takes a few different shapes, though each one begins the same way, with a bottle opened and a question asked.

Most often it is a tasting note: one bottle, one date, one honest opinion, first shared with the community on Instagram at @BordeauxReviews and then kept here so nothing is lost.

Some stories deserve more than a note. The Château Case Files are an investigative series that puts the tales Bordeaux likes to tell about itself on trial, weighing the legend against the record before arriving at a verdict, always with the sources laid open for you to check. Each case appears first on Instagram and then here, in full.

And most mornings there is the Daily Briefing, a short email that reads the world’s wine press so you do not have to and hands back only what matters for Bordeaux, explained plainly and finished with a fact drawn from my personal archive. You can subscribe here.

Behind all of it sits a page for every estate, where each thing ever written here about that château is gathered in one place, so the record grows a little fuller with every pour.

A bottle is a place before it is a wine, so there is a map. It draws all 44 appellations of the Gironde from the official areas and lays them over one another the way they really lie, which is the part the posters never show: Bordeaux is not 44 places side by side, it is 44 areas stacked on top of each other. A row of vines in Pauillac is entitled to 6 names at once, and the map will tell you all 6. Pull the second layer and every shape shrinks to the delimited vineyard itself, parcel by parcel, as INAO approved it, because a vine standing 1 meter outside those lines cannot carry the name. Choose a classification and the classified châteaux come up as pins, on the ground they actually stand on.

Click a name and you land on the appellation, where the rules are laid out as the cahier des charges lays them out: which grapes may be planted, how close together, how much may be picked from a hectare, how ripe it must be before the wine is allowed the name at all. Most wine writing treats those documents as paperwork. I read them as the constitution of the place, because that is what they are, and when the text changes I say which order changed it and when.

Bordeaux cannot stop ranking itself, so the classifications are here in full, each with every revision it has been through: the Classification of 1855, and the 2 occasions in 171 years on which that list has moved; the Saint-Émilion ranking, torn up and rebuilt every 10 years, which 3 of its 4 top estates refused to enter in 2022; the Crus Classés de Graves; the Crus Bourgeois, annulled by a court in 2007 and put back together 2 times since; the Crus Artisans, which score the grower before they score the wine; and the MICHELIN Guide's first Bordeaux selection. Promotions, demotions, withdrawals and mergers, with the dates and the names.

News is the day by day record of what the world's wine press actually said about Bordeaux, each item with its source and a line on why it matters, kept so you can walk backward through it by day, by month, by subject or by estate. The Daily Briefing is the email that arrives in the morning; News is the room it is written in.

Study is where you can learn, and we make learning fun. Whether you are preparing for a wine certification, such as the WSET, the Wine Scholar Guild, or the Master of Wine, or simply deepening your own knowledge for the love of it, we give you several ways to play your way to mastery. Climb through 5 difficulty levels of flash cards, from Cinquième Cru to Premier Cru, then test yourself against a 6th level: an interactive map that hands you a blank map and asks you to place the names. Browse a shelf of short guides that answer the questions people actually ask. And when you are ready for the summit, take on the Premier Cru Supérieur examination: 20 open-book questions that only the Case Files answer.

None of this floats free. Beneath every tasting note, every verdict, every morning email sits ClaretBot, a research engine of my own making: a library of more than 244,000 wine documents, the oldest a fragment from 1373, all of it read in the original and cited by author, title, and year. Trade directories and brokers' books, treatises, theses, peer-reviewed papers, forgotten pamphlets, 6 centuries of people trying to describe the same handful of hills. It is why the writing here can afford to be certain, and it stands on one promise, plain enough to hold me to it: when an article quotes a page, the page exists.

I have spent 20 years opening bottles from Bordeaux and writing down what they told me. I live at an unlikely and happy crossroads of law and wine: admitted to the bar in Florida, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, and, on the other side of my life, a French Wine Scholar, a Master of Bordeaux through the Wine Scholar Guild, and a holder of the WSET Level 3 certification. Long before any of it I was a reader, the kind of child who trusted old books and went looking for the story buried under the story, and I never grew out of it. That love of history, of the paper trail a claim leaves behind, is what became the archive inside ClaretBot and the instinct behind the Case Files; I would rather spend an evening chasing a footnote to its source than take a legend on faith. I bring a lawyer’s instinct for testing a claim against the evidence to a subject most people meet with pure feeling, and the result is meant to be rigorous without ever losing the pleasure that started it. I edit Bordeaux Reviews, and you can follow me at @gutoassumpcao.

If all of this is new, here is the shortest honest route in that I know how to build. Open the map and find Pauillac. Read that appellation to the end. Then the classification of 1855, to see who stands on that ground and where the brokers put them 171 years ago. Then any tasting note from one of those châteaux, to hear what the wine is doing now, which is the only part the documents cannot tell you. That is 4 pages and about 20 minutes, and at the end of it Bordeaux has stopped being a wall of names.

Questions, corrections, and trade inquiries are always welcome at antonio@bordeauxreviews.com; corrections especially, since a publication that puts stories on trial had better be willing to be corrected itself.

Follow the tastings at @BordeauxReviews and me at @gutoassumpcao, and come back often. There is always another bottle waiting, and always another story worth putting to the test.