Can a wine buy its way to the top?

Open the Bordeaux trade's directory at its price table for the 1865 vintage and count the rows. The 1855 Classification has 5 tiers, and the table adds a line for the superior bourgeois beneath them, which makes 6 classes. The table has 7 rows. The extra one belongs to a single wine, labeled "2nd growth Mouton" and set above the other Seconds and below the Firsts.

The directory was Cocks and Féret's Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, the reference book that sat on every merchant's desk in Bordeaux. The table first appears in its edition of 1868, and the row stayed in every edition to 1899. From 1868 on, the same book told its readers that the list itself needed redoing.

What I did not expect, when I started pulling the old trade directories for this case, was to find Mouton's argument already made, and not by a Rothschild.

The story most of us learned runs differently. In 1855 the wine brokers of Bordeaux ranked the great growths of the Médoc for Napoleon III's Exposition Universelle, the world's fair in Paris. Mouton went into the books as a Second Growth, one tier below Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion, the four the trade called the Firsts.

Baron Philippe de Rothschild was handed Château Mouton Rothschild in 1922, and with it a grievance that was already 67 years old. He spent the next 51 years arguing the point, and he put the argument on the label: Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Mouton suis. First I cannot be, second I do not deign to be, Mouton I am. In 1973 the French state gave in, and Mouton became the only estate ever to move up.

A wrong finally righted, or a rank finally bought, depending on who is telling it. The suspicion that it was bought is the claim on trial here. If the trade's own book had been printing Mouton's case since 1868, what did half a century of Rothschild persistence actually buy? To answer that you have to know what the brokers were doing in April 1855. The honest answer is bookkeeping, in a hurry.

2 weeks in April

Napoleon III wanted the finest wines of Bordeaux at his fair. The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce, needing a map of the best estates for the display, asked the brokers' union, the Chambre syndicale des courtiers, to draw one up. The wine historian Stefan Estreicher, in a 2023 article in the European Review, describes what followed.

The brokers were given 2 weeks. They held sale records for hundreds of properties, some going back to 1775, and from those records they produced their list on April 18, 1855. "There was no tasting, no estate visits, and no consultation with wine producers," Estreicher writes. "Everybody assumed that this would be just one more informal classification."

They sorted 57 red wines into 5 tiers, "ranked by their average price per tun," the tun being the Bordeaux tonneau of 4 barrels, about 900 liters. The Firsts had averaged more than 3,000 francs a tun over the years, the Seconds 2,100 to 2,400, the Thirds 1,800 to 2,100.

It looked like one more informal classification because the trade had been drawing them up for decades, and Mouton had been a Second in every one of them printed since 1816. André Jullien, a Paris wine merchant whose Topographie de tous les vignobles connus of 1816 was the era's guide to every vineyard on earth, put Mouton among the wines "that stand in the first rank of the second class."

Charles Cocks, the Englishman whose guide to the claret country of 1846 grew into the directory that still carries his name, placed Mouton among the Seconds too. He explained the whole method in a sentence the brokers could have signed: price, he wrote, "having appeared to me the best test of the quality supposed to exist in each wine." The brokers of 1855 did not invent a ranking. They copied one that had been in print for 40 years and gave it a government seal.

Mouton had changed hands twice in those years, and the dates matter more than they look. In 1830 Baron Hector de Brane sold it to Thuret for 1,200,000 francs. The Brane family then bought Gorce at Cantenac, the estate that bears its name today. In 1853 Thuret sold to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild for 1,125,000 francs: 6% less after 23 years, with oidium then working through the Médoc. Both sums are in the table of estate sales in the 1853 edition of the Traité sur les vins du Médoc, the region's standard handbook, by the Bordeaux merchant William Franck.

So Rothschild money was inside Mouton 2 years before the brokers sat down, and Mouton was ranked a Second all the same. On a method built from decades of average prices, money could not have bought anything.

Nobody demoted Mouton either. If anything the brokers' method worked against it in a subtler way. Their tiers were built on long averages, and Mouton had just moved. Estreicher notes that it "had recently been selling at prices very close to those of Lafite," and Cyril Ray, whose 1974 history of Mouton tells the estate's own story, dates the moment to December 1854, 4 months before the brokers wrote.

An instrument built from long averages is meant to ignore a 4-month move. By its own rules the list ranked Mouton correctly, and it was already behind the market on the day it was signed. That lag would matter for the next 100 years.

The book on every desk

Cocks died in 1854, and his directory passed to Édouard Féret, a Bordeaux publisher who was still a boy at the time. From the second edition, of 1868, the directory reprinted the brokers' list and told its readers what the list was. In the words of its English edition of 1899, the ranking was "not the result of the personal appreciation of the brokers assembled in 1855, but a confirmation of long established custom," drawn from the average prices of many years.

Then it adds a warning, and it went on adding it for 54 years:

Like all human institution, this classification is subject to the laws of time, and must necessarily at certain periods be readjusted in order to conform with the progress made. Neglected by a careless or involved proprietor a vineyard may fall into the hands of a rich, active and enlightened man, and consequently give far better results. The opposite may also happen, and it was therefore found necessary in 1855 to modify the ancient classification.

« Comme toutes les institutions humaines, celle-là est soumise aux lois du temps, et doit nécessairement, à certaines époques, être rajeunie, mise au niveau du progrès. »

Cocks and Féret, 3rd English edition, 1899; the French from the 5th edition, 1886

The library behind this series holds 8 editions of the book, from 1868 to 1922, and that paragraph is in every one of them. The third edition, of 1874, even keeps count. At the foot of the fifth growths it adds that "for nineteen years many changes made among the great growths of the Médoc have called for the revision of this work," depuis dix-neuf ans in the original.

Count back 19 years from 1874 and you reach 1855, the year the list was made. By the English edition of 1883 the count had become "the last twenty-five years," and the starting point had not moved. By the directory's own arithmetic the Classification had needed redoing from the year it was made. The whole Bordeaux trade read the warning and revised nothing.

Something else had happened to the list by 1868, and the directory records it without seeming to notice. Beside its price tables it prints a rule of thumb, here in the words of its English edition of 1883: "a fifth growth will sell for very little the half of a second … the first obtaining about 30 % more than the second," and it says why: a constant proportion between the classes "facilitates commercial operations."

Those are conversion rates. A ranking assembled from what wines had fetched had become the schedule by which wines were priced, and after that no price could argue with the list, because the list had set the price. The multiple drifted as the Firsts pulled away, 25% in the 1868 edition, 30% in 1883, 30% to 50% from 1886 onward. The order beneath it never moved at all.

A row of its own

Every schedule of fixed ratios has one entry that will not convert, and in this one it was Mouton. Here is the table from the opening, as the directory printed it.

Cocks and Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, 1886, pp. 108 to 109, "Vente des récoltes 1865 et 1874." The 1865 columns first appear in the 2nd edition of 1868, pp. 89 to 90; the 1874 column is added in 1886 and carried to 1899.

The ratios were rough, and the table shows how rough: at vintage time in 1865 the Firsts fetched more than double the other Seconds. What held in every column was the order, class above class.

One wine broke it. In every column Mouton sits well above the other Seconds and below the Firsts, and the gap to the Firsts narrows as the years pass. It could not be filed with the Seconds without breaking the arithmetic, or with the Firsts without amending the Classification. So the directory gave it a row of its own. The trade admitted the case in a table a quarter of a century before it said so in words.

The words came in 1893, when the Pauillac entry said Mouton "always obtains a price above those of that class," and in 1898 the entry added the sentence Philippe de Rothschild would live on:

Its wines, though still classed as second growth, always sell at a price far above those of that class, and for some years they have obtained prices analogous to those of the first growths; and the jury of the 13th Bordeaux Exhibition of 1895 awarded them the grand-prix diploma, granted only to the four first classed growths.

« Ses vins, quoique classés encore 2e cru, se vendent toujours à un prix très supérieur à ceux de cette classe … »

Cocks and Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 7th edition, 1898, Pauillac

The brokers of 1855 had never tasted. In 1895 a jury at the city's own exhibition did, and gave Mouton the diploma otherwise reserved for the 4 Firsts.

The directory printed that paragraph unchanged for the next 24 years. The 1922 edition, the one on the desks when Philippe took over, repeats it with 2 more diplomas added, Paris in 1900 and Liège in 1905. He inherited that book along with the estate. Everything he would spend 50 years arguing was already in it, most of it since 1868, and nobody had drawn the conclusion.

What the money bought

The motto was a good line, and it was also a lobbying position, because Philippe needed one. The brokers' letter had never had legal force of its own. In 1949, Estreicher notes, the French legislature regulated the grands crus of Bordeaux by reference to it, and from then on a change of tier needed the state.

In 1959 the Baron revived the Syndicat des Crus Classés, the classed growths' association, and put revision to a vote. Every man in that room owned a rank, and the one asking them to reopen the list was the only one with a rank he wanted changed. He carried it by 2 votes.

The INAO, the national appellation authority, sent the Minister of Agriculture a revised classification in 1960 whose only change was a list of 5 Firsts with Mouton among them. Nothing was signed. The Wine Scholar Guild's course notes, drawing on Benjamin Lewin's What Price Bordeaux? of 2009, have the sequel. A petition through the Chamber of Commerce in 1969 failed. A second, in 1972, succeeded, and in 1973 Jacques Chirac, then Minister of Agriculture, signed the arrêté, the ministerial decree that moved Mouton to the first tier.

Part of the stated justification, the political economist Colin Hay records in a 2007 paper, was that Mouton "had consistently attained first growth prices en primeur." The state promoted Mouton on precisely the ground the directory had been printing since 1868. The label answered once more: Premier je suis, second je fus, Mouton ne change. First I am, second I was, Mouton does not change.

Which leaves the part of the skeptics' case that is right, and it deserves saying plainly. Mouton's case was strong, and it was not the only strong one. The brokers had made one exception in 1855, Haut-Brion, a Graves that sold at the price of the Firsts. La Mission Haut-Brion, across the road from it, sold from 1869 at the price of the leading classed Thirds by the directory's own reckoning, and the exception was never extended to it. Other estates had price cases and no door to knock on.

Half a century of persistence, 14 years of it aimed formally at the French state, came from a family that had been bankers to governments before it owned a vine. If money and access decided anything, they decided who got a hearing. What they did not decide is what the book had been saying. Jullien, Franck, and Cocks had all placed Mouton among the Seconds while the owners were still Brane and Thuret. Cyrus Redding, an English journalist whose History and Description of Modern Wines appeared in 1833, called Mouton "the wine next in quality to Lafitte" 20 years before a Rothschild bought it.

The verdict

False. Money opened the door; the wine had earned the room. By the 1890s Mouton met the only standing test anyone had published for the ranking, the directory's own, and it held a First's diploma from 1895; for a generation before that it had traded in a row by itself, above the other Seconds, in the trade's own tables. The brokers of 1855 had set no test for the future. The 1973 decree applied the logic of 1855 to one wine and to no other, and applied evenly it would have moved other estates in both directions, as the directory had been saying since 1874. The ministry declined to do that, and in declining it did what the trade had done since 1868: it kept the list because the list was convenient. Saint-Émilion's classification of 1955 was written to be revised every decade or so, so the freeze is a choice rather than a regional habit. France would build a new list sooner than reopen the old one, and in all the years since 1855 exactly one estate has persuaded a minister to move it.

The 1922 edition prints the warning on pages 62 and 63, where the 5 tiers end. Philippe de Rothschild took charge of Mouton that year. The ministry signed 51 years later.

The wine

Mouton earns the rank now, and it did not always. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, 1982 and 1986 excepted, the vintage mattered more than the label, and buying Mouton on the name alone in those years is how people got disappointed. That counts against the habit of 1855 rather than against the decree of 1973: a rank fixed once cannot follow a cellar in either direction. From the mid-1990s the estate has been steady, and at its best it does something the other four do not, an opulence that stays structured, weight carried on a frame rather than resting on the palate. It is the most extrovert of the First Growths, and the one I would rather drink young.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 1st edition, Paris, 1816, pp. 234 to 235.
• Cyrus Redding, A History and Description of Modern Wines, London, 1833, the pages on the Médoc.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, pp. 193 to 194.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the table of estate sales.
• Armand d'Armailhacq, De la culture des vignes, de la vinification et des vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, the Cantenac pages, for the purchase of Gorce after the sale of Mouton.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, pp. 89 to 90, the classification and the 1865 price table.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1874, the note at the foot of the fifth growths.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, Bordeaux, 1886, pp. 108 to 109, the sales of 1865 and 1874.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 6th edition, Bordeaux, 1893, Pauillac.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 7th edition, Bordeaux, 1898, Pauillac.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, pp. 62 to 63 and the Pauillac pages.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classified in Order of Merit, 2nd English edition, Bordeaux, 1883, the classification and its notes.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classed by Order of Merit, 3rd English edition, Bordeaux, 1899, the classification and its notes.

Modern scholarship.

• Cyril Ray, Mouton Rothschild: The Wine, the Family, the Museum, Christie's Wine Publications, London, 1974, for the December 1854 prices; the chapter on the Classification as reprinted in On Bordeaux, edited by Susan Keevil, Académie du Vin Library, 2020.
• Colin Hay, "Globalisation and the Institutional Re-embedding of Markets: The Political Economy of Price Formation in the Bordeaux En Primeur Market", New Political Economy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, pp. 185 to 209, for the stated justification of the 1973 decree. doi.org
• Benjamin Lewin, What Price Bordeaux?, 2009, as cited in Wine Scholar Guild, Bordeaux Masters, Volume 6, Classifications, 2024, for the petitions of 1969 and 1972.
• Stefan K. Estreicher, "Wine and France: A Brief History", European Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2023, pp. 138 to 139, for the brokers' 2 weeks, the tiers and their prices, the law of 1949, the vote of 1959, and the decree of 1973. Open access. Cambridge Core

The estate's own account.

• Château Mouton Rothschild, the estate's published history, for Baron Philippe de Rothschild's arrival in 1922.

How this was checked

Every period quotation was read in the original text, in a private library of 244,000+ wine documents, the oldest from 1373. Where an English edition is quoted its wording is kept, spelling and all; the other translations from the French are mine, with the French beneath the lines that matter most so that you can check one against the other. If a page cited here does not say what I say it says, write to me at antonio@bordeauxreviews.com and I will correct it.

To cite this article: Antonio Assumpção, "Can a wine buy its way to the top?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 01/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/can-a-wine-buy-its-way-to-the-top/.

Antonio "Guto" Assumpção stands at the intersection of law and wine. Admitted to practice law in Florida, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, he is also a French Wine Scholar and a Master of Bordeaux by the Wine Scholar Guild and holds a WSET Level 3 certification. Antonio has been studying, collecting, and tasting Bordeaux wines for the past 20 years, and his articles blend a detailed analysis with a connoisseur's insight into the world of wine. Follow him on Instagram at @BordeauxReviews.