Could the Classification be appealed?

In 1845 William Franck's Traité sur les vins du Médoc, the Bordeaux wine merchant's book of prices and rankings, gave Cantemerle the most admiring paragraph Franck writes about any estate outside the First Growths. It is printed in small type at the foot of the Macau table. The land, he says, carries "a vast bed of rolled pebbles whose seam is at a remarkable elevation and a happy exposure"; to that soil, and to the grape varieties and the winemaking methods handed down among its possessors, he attributes "the uncontested superiority of its wines over the comparable products of the surrounding vineyards."

The same book carries price tables: realized prices for named growths across the 1830s, and the principal sales of the 1844 harvest, commune by commune. Cantemerle appears in none of them. In the whole volume the estate is named 3 times, and not one of the mentions carries a price.

A decade later the wine brokers of Bordeaux ranked the Médoc for Napoleon III's Exposition Universelle, and in the spring of 1855 their list went to Paris without Cantemerle.

Everyone agrees the 1855 Classification was carved in stone the day it appeared, and for proof they point to Mouton, which needed 118 years and a Rothschild to move one rank. That belief is the one this file puts on trial. The question underneath it is stranger. How does an estate Franck's book admired that much go missing from the trade's own ranking? And when its proprietor, a widow, the Baronne de Villeneuve-Durfort, went to the brokers about it, what exactly did she have to prove?

The whole crop went to Holland

The estate at Macau was old, large, and famous, and it had been in the Villeneuve family for more than 3 centuries. In the note that praises its gravel, Franck turns to the bookkeeping:

Since time immemorial, the whole of the harvest of Cantemerle is shipped to Holland by the proprietor and for his own account. In the last century the first sales of it were made by the house of Couderc, of Amsterdam. In more recent times the realization of the wines of Cantemerle was entrusted to the honorable houses of Lepel and Labouchère and Luden and Poël; and finally, for several years now, they are consigned to Messrs. Van der Kun and Van Schelle, of Rotterdam. [...] The average production of Cantemerle is 120 to 130 tonneaux, not counting 10 tonneaux of second wine and 12 tonneaux of press wine, which are sold on the spot for local consumption.

« Depuis un temps immémorial, la totalité de la récolte de Cantemerle est expédiée en Hollande par le propriétaire et pour son compte. [...] La production moyenne de Cantemerle est de 120 à 130 tonneaux, non compris 10 tonneaux de 2e vin et 12 tonneaux de vin de presse, qui sont vendus sur place pour la consommation du pays. »

William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, the note to the Macau table

That is 4 Dutch houses, named, across 3 phases of the trade, in a book every Bordeaux merchant owned. The owner sold the wine himself, to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, every autumn, for longer than anyone could date. Bordeaux got the remainder, disposed of locally for country drinking.

So a Bordeaux broker was not short of prices for Cantemerle. He had 22 tonneaux a year of them (a Bordeaux tonneau is 4 barrels, about 900 liters), all second wine and press wine. What he did not have, and could not have, was a single price for the wine that was being ranked, because the grand vin, the estate's first wine, never passed through a broker's hands at all.

The one body that could rule

Franck had also explained, in the same edition, why ranking an estate like this was never going to be simple. His chapter on classing the wines of the Médoc refuses to class them. "The list of the fifths expands and contracts according to private opinions," he writes, and then: "The Chambre syndicale des courtiers alone could render a ruling in such a matter, but it is very doubtful that it would ever wish to take on so delicate a task."

He gave named lists for the first 4 classes, carried over from his edition of 1824. For the fifth class he gave no names at all, only a description: the large properties of Pauillac and Saint-Estèphe, with some others of Labarde and Margaux. Macau is not in that sentence.

The body he had named as the only one competent to rule sat down 10 years later and ruled. The trade's directory would later describe the method, in a sentence of 1868 that shows what Bordeaux believed its own instrument had been: the classification "is not the result of the personal appreciation of the brokers who met in 1855; it is the fruit of long observations and of the calculation of the average of the prices obtained by the principal growths over a very great number of years."

A classification made from prices obtained is a different kind of object from a classification made from what people say. On prices obtained in Bordeaux, Cantemerle's grand vin had none.

Cantemerle gets a country

Opinion in the books was thin too. André Jullien's survey of the world's vineyards (1832), Cyrus Redding's English history of modern wines (1833) and Pierre Biarnez's verses on the great growths (1849) all pass it over. Charles Cocks, the English schoolmaster in Bordeaux whose name would end up on the trade's directory for generations, does better, in the guide he wrote for a London publisher in 1846:

On leaving Blanquefort, the first commune of any importance is Ludon, which possesses a cru termed La Lagune, a fourth growth. At Macau, we find Cantemerle, a wine much esteemed in Holland; and in the parish of Labarde, a tolerable third cru, Giscours.

Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, the survey of the communes of the Médoc

That is 2 sentences and 3 estates. La Lagune and Giscours get a number. Cantemerle gets a country.

Between 1850 and 1855 a number arrives from several directions. Cocks lists it among the Fifth Growths in his French guide of 1850, under the widow de Villeneuve Durfort. Franck abandons his old list in 1853 and puts it among the Fifths in a revised table of his own. Armand d'Armailhacq, a Médoc proprietor whose treatise on the vine appeared in 1855, writes that the best wine of Macau "is classed at Bordeaux among the fifth great growths; but in Holland it enjoys the greatest favor."

Cocks had set out his method at the head of that 1850 list. Average sale price was the base, and "everything that has already been written on this subject" and "the most competent judges" supplemented it. With no Bordeaux sale to average, the last 2 are what carried Cantemerle. Franck, who had called a private classification impossible, was recording a change of opinion. No price had appeared.

So by the time the brokers met, both authorities who had given Cantemerle a number had put it in the fifth class, and the brokers left it out anyway. The transactions had not moved, and the brokers had undertaken to rank on transactions.

A price in the wrong city

The wine had a price the whole time. It was denominated in the wrong city.

Charles Saint-Amant walked the Médoc in 1855 and wrote it up for a general reader, and the arrangement at Macau does not trouble him. The jewel of the commune, he says, classed in the fifth, is Sauves-Cantemerle, the fine patrimonial property of the Villeneuve family, and its wines are "sold in advance, by century-old contracts with Amsterdam, which corners them and holds them as first marques." In Amsterdam this was a first marque, a leading label. In Bordeaux the grand vin had no transaction history at all.

Then Saint-Amant does something nobody else in this literature does. He stops, in the middle of a walking tour, and states the principle:

It is to be remarked that wines are not of an absolute quality only, but that they have relative virtues more or less pronounced. Thus a wine judged superior in one country would be inferior in another, and the reverse. The climate in which the wine is drunk acts enormously upon its quality. The Bordeaux classification is only for the locality.

« La classification bordelaise n'est que pour la localité. »

Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, the Macau pages

He wrote it in the year of the Classification, in front of the estate that proved it, with no professional stake in the answer.

The Baronne answered the omission by going to the brokers with her sale records, and in September, with the Exposition still open, Cantemerle was added to the Fifth Growths.

The amendment is still visible on the original document. I have looked at the handwritten letter, and her estate's name sits squeezed in at the end, beneath the last of the Fifths, in a different and smaller hand from the rest. It really was a last-minute addition, and it is the only one the list has ever had.

Saint-Amant's sentence recasts what happened in September. Quality was never the question. Nobody needed persuading that the wine was good, and nothing in this file suggests anybody raised the question. What the Baronne had to establish was jurisdictional: that sales made in Rotterdam, on the owner's account, in guilders, to houses whose names stood in Franck, were the same kind of fact as a price struck on the quay at Bordeaux. The brokers accepted that they were, and they accepted it in a season.

That is a more interesting event than an oversight. The usual explanation of the omission is a clerk who skipped a line, and it would explain the speed of the correction very neatly. It does not survive the evidence. A slip explains a missing name, not a missing number, and by 1855 the most admiring page in the literature on this estate was also the one page in it with no price.

The neighbor that came back too late

If the mechanism is real it should have caught somebody else, and it did, in the same commune, with nobody to rescue them. Of the 5 growths of Macau that Franck's survey names as renowned in Holland, Cantemerle is the one he sets apart. The other 4, La Houringue, Lassus, La Pelouse, and Préban, he gives as selling a little below the fourth class.

La Pelouse became, under its proprietor's surname, Château Cambon-La-Pelouse, and Féret's directory explained in 1893 what became of it: its wines had been shipped to Holland, "where they were often paid at prices higher than those then obtained in France by the 5th and even the 4th growths. Since 1854, they have ceased to be shipped directly abroad and are now sold to the Bordeaux trade. Long forgotten on our marketplace, these wines could only be classed there among the superior bourgeois growths."

Cambon came back to the Bordeaux market one year before the brokers sat down, and against an average taken over a very great number of years, one year is not distinguishable from none. A marketplace remembers in decades, and Cambon had given it a season.

Cantemerle was the one name in that commune Franck could not price at all, and it was the only one of the 5 that ended up classed, because it was the only one that could produce the receipts from somewhere else.

Nearly every year, a Second's price

The Classification was corrected once, in its first year, and then left as it was until 1973. That was not because nobody noticed it had aged. Charles Cocks died in 1854, and his directory passed to Édouard Féret, a Bordeaux publisher. From the second edition of 1868 the directory printed, on the same page as the brokers' list, that "like all human institutions, this one is subject to the laws of time, and must certainly, at certain periods, be rejuvenated, brought up to the level of progress." For 54 years, through the edition of 1922, the reference book of the Bordeaux wine trade reproduced the list textually and told its readers beside it that the list needed redoing.

It also kept the receipts that proved the point, on the estate it had helped to rescue. By 1886 the note on Cantemerle has the Bordeaux trade buying the wine almost always en primeur, while it was still in barrel, to ship to Holland or England, at "a premium of 10% over the prices of the 5th growths." The trade had made itself the middleman on the route it was once cut out of altogether. By 1922 the premium had left the class behind. The reputation had grown, the directory said, and the premium with it, to the point that the wine "reaches almost every year the price of the second growths."

In 1845 Franck's book could not say what Cantemerle sold for. By 1922 the trade's directory was reporting it at second growth prices almost every year, and still listing it as a Fifth.

The same directory had set down, in 1898, the trade's rule of thumb that a fifth growth sells at roughly half a second. A wine at those prices almost every year was therefore selling at something close to twice the class it was listed in, on the very criterion the same book said the list was built from, a few leaves from the sentence saying the list must be rejuvenated.

The family did not outlast its own premium. Cantemerle went by licitation, the auction of a jointly owned property, in June 1892, and the Dubos brothers were in possession by 1922. But the first-marque label the trade bought still opened with the old name, and in both the 1898 and 1922 editions the first word of it is Villeneuve: the family had sold the vineyard and kept the signature on the bottle.

The verdict

False. One woman with 40 years of receipts appealed, and won. Cantemerle was able to do in a few months what Mouton tried for a century. The Classification was appealable in 1855 because in 1855 it was 5 months old and was the first authoritative answer to a question the trade's own handbook had admitted it could not settle. Franck had written that the list of fifths expanded and contracted with private opinion, that only the syndics could rule, and that he doubted they ever would, and then he had left the fifth growths off his own pages rather than name them. When the syndics finally ruled, a correction inside the same year was not a humiliation. It was maintenance on a new instrument.

The brokers deserve fairness while you are at it, because the omission was neither laziness nor snobbery. They had undertaken to rank the Médoc by what its wines had been paid here, and Cantemerle had spent a century selling past them, deliberately, at good money, to Amsterdam. When they were shown sales of their own kind in another currency, they took them. The instrument was narrow. The men were not. The evidence stayed, and so did the method. What changed afterward was the standing of the paper: they ruled once, and the trade then spent 54 years printing the observation that the ruling needed revisiting while revisiting nothing, until the next single line to move required a Rothschild, a revived syndicate, and a wait of 118 years. The door was never formally closed. Hardly anyone tried the handle again, and the difference between Cantemerle and everyone who came after is that Cantemerle tried it while the paint was still wet.

The wine

Cantemerle is the Haut-Médoc I recommend most often and defend least effectively, because the thing that makes it good is the thing that makes it easy to overlook. It is perfumed, mid-weight, gravel-driven, and quietly persistent, with none of the shoulders that get a wine noticed in a lineup and all of the length that gets it finished at a table. The park it sits in does the estate no commercial favors, since people photograph the trees and forget the bottle. Franck's readers in 1845 were told these wines bear the ordeal of long voyages and of years marvelously well, which is still the most useful thing anyone has written about the place. Buy it by the case, open it at 10 years, and accept that nobody at the table will ask what it is until the second glass.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, chapter XII on the classing of the wines of the Médoc, the Macau table and its note, the price tables of the 1830s, and the sales of 1844.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the classification and the Macau note.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, the survey of the communes of the Médoc.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, the statement of method at the head of the classification and the fifth growths.
• Armand d'Armailhacq, De la culture des vignes, de la vinification et des vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, pp. 506 and 514.
• Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, the Macau pages.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, the classification and its preamble, and Macau.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, Bordeaux, 1886, Macau.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 6th edition, Bordeaux, 1893, Macau, with the note on Château Cambon-La-Pelouse.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 7th edition, Bordeaux, 1898, Macau, and the rule of thumb on the prices of the classes.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, Macau and the classification.
• André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 3rd edition, Paris, 1832, searched for Cantemerle and silent on the Macau estate.
• Cyrus Redding, A History and Description of Modern Wines, London, 1833, searched for Cantemerle and silent.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, searched for Cantemerle and silent.

Modern scholarship.

• Dewey Markham Jr., 1855: A History of the Bordeaux Classification, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1997, for the composition of the brokers' document, the absence of Cantemerle from it in April, and the September addition on the proprietor's sale records.

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, "Could the Classification be appealed?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 06/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/could-the-classification-be-appealed/.

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.