Does great wine need centuries?

In 1824 the greatest name in Saint-Estèphe changed hands, and the Bordeaux trade's handbook recorded it the way it recorded everything: 2 columns, former proprietor and present one, no comment.

The book is William Franck's Traité sur les vins du Médoc, the first edition of what became the region's standard reference. The second line of its Saint-Estèphe table reads Segur (de) on the left and Dumoulin on the right. The estate is Calon, the oldest and grandest name in the parish.

Nothing anywhere in the volume mentions Montrose. Not the classification, which comes 25 pages later. Not the index of proprietors at the back, which carries 13 names for Saint-Estèphe and none of them this one.

What the Dumoulins did over the next 31 years is the reverse of what families are supposed to do with a great name. They let Calon fall. Charles Cocks, whose guide to the claret country appeared in London in 1846, notes it in one clause on his way past: Calon, "though formerly the first cru of the parish, is now among the fourth." And on the cleared woodland above it they made a wine that in 1855 the brokers of Bordeaux ranked a Second Growth of the Médoc, in a vineyard 40 years old.

The belief this file puts on trial is one everybody in wine repeats: great terroir proves itself across generations, and a vineyard cleared out of woodland inside a single working life is by definition not yet serious. For nearly every classified estate it is true. Montrose is the exception, and even its 40 years overstate the wait. The wine had sold with the Seconds in 1825, 10 years after planting, on the recollection 30 years later of Armand d'Armailhacq, a Médoc proprietor whose treatise on the vine became the standard work of its generation. What took 40 years was not the wine but the trade's agreement to write it down.

So the question worth asking is not whether a young vineyard could reach the second rank, because one did. It is why nothing has done it since. Cantemerle was added to the list that September on the strength of sales nobody had counted, and Mouton moved up a class in 1973; no new name has come in from outside for having climbed.

New growths form

Franck brought out his second edition in 1845 and opened the classification by telling his readers exactly what he had done to it. He was reprinting the list of 1824 with "no other change than two or three rectifications that have become necessary." Two or three in 21 years: that is the revision rate of the instrument, stated by the man holding the pen. A few lines later he says what one of them was:

We do not, moreover, mean to give this enumeration as complete; from time to time new growths form which deserve to be classed; thus, in our work of 1824, we had not been able to include the growth of Montrose, at Saint-Estèphe.

« Nous n'entendons point d'ailleurs donner cette énumération comme complète ; de temps à autre se forment de nouveaux crûs qui méritent d'être classés ; c'est ainsi que, dans notre travail de 1824, nous n'avions pu comprendre le crû de Montrose, à Saint-Estèphe. »

William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845

New growths form. They deserve to be classed. The list is a document that gets things added to it, and the single named example of an addition is Montrose.

On the same pages Franck explains what a class actually was: wines "endowed with an equal superiority" that "ought to be paid the same price," sorted into bands that usage had sanctioned "with the force of law." Then he adds a warning about the line between them. It "stretches or contracts in certain cases at the pleasure of opinions too little disinterested to stay always within the bounds of truth."

The boundary moves, and it moves because interested people push it. The man whose book the trade used as its working reference wrote that 10 years before the brokers drew the boundary that has not moved since.

If the classes are price bands, the evidence is prices. At the back of the same volume Franck prints what named estates had actually been paid across 5 vintages between 1833 and 1840. The first line of the Saint-Estèphe block is the vineyard that had not existed in 1824. The line beneath it is the estate the Dumoulins had owned when it did not exist.

William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, quantities and prices for 1833, 1837, 1838, 1839 and 1840. The gaps in the columns are Franck's own, and he apologizes for them.

Calon made more wine. Montrose was paid roughly half as much again for it, and had been for years. In a document whose classes are price bands, that is evidence in the instrument's own unit.

The able creator

Somebody had made this out of nothing in particular, and the books agree on that even when they agree on little else. D'Armailhacq calls the vineyard "newly created on cleared woodland," which is a statement about the ground from a man who farmed near it.

By the estate's own account, the elder Dumoulin had bought Calon-Ségur at auction in 1778, with a wild ridge above the river thrown in, and his son Théodore cleared and planted it in 1815; the pink bloom of the heather on the ridge, the story goes, is what named the hill Mont-Rose. No book quoted here dates the planting or explains the name, and the case does not need either. It needs the prices, and those are in print.

The sharpest account of how it was done is in verse. Pierre Biarnez, whom the trade's own directory would later call the poet of the great wines of Bordeaux, put the Médoc estate by estate into alexandrines in 1849. In his telling Calon-Ségur falls below a third as soon as its master abandons it, and then the same hand "works a ground that will become Montrose."

His Montrose "Has almost the finesse and the brilliance of the seconds" already, and he names the vintage that did the arguing, the 1834: "And if it were always like the 34," he wrote, it "could fight them with no disadvantage at all." It is one of the few places in this file where somebody puts the wine in his mouth instead of in a column.

Biarnez leaves the hand as a hand. The naming comes from Alfred Danflou, whose illustrated survey of the great estates went to press in Bordeaux 18 years later and credits the layout of the rows to "the persevering initiative of Mr. Dumoulin the elder, the able creator of this magnificent property." Danflou, shorter than the poet, says the 1834 "made an epoch in the world of gourmets."

Able creator, not heir. Montrose was a thing a family decided to build, and the books were watching them build it.

Nobody could agree where to put it

By the 1840s the trade could not agree where to put the thing, and it said so in print for a decade. Franck's own classification of 1845 carries the entry "Montrose Dumoulin, at St.-Estèphe, often as second growths," a list dissenting from itself inside a single line.

Cocks, in London the next year, gives it as a wine "which claims also to be placed among the third, though it is but very recently planted." In 1850, when he brought out the Bordeaux edition that founded the trade directory, his second growths contain no Saint-Estèphe wine of any kind, and Montrose sits among the Thirds at 110 tonneaux.

Then came Franck's third edition, of 1853, and the disagreement went into the typography. He opens the chapter with what I think is the single most useful paragraph in this file: "One growth, which a certain broker calls a third, ought not, in his colleague's view, to leave the category of the fourths. The list of the fifths stretches or contracts at the pleasure of particular opinions."

He submits his table as an attempt "which we by no means offer as a judgment in the last resort," because "in such a matter it is utterly impossible to obtain unanimous assent." Those are brokers disagreeing with brokers, inside the professional body that would issue the official list 2 years later.

Turn 2 pages and Montrose sits in the third growths, with Calon a class lower in the fourths. At the foot of the page, 2 notes in small type do to the list exactly what Franck had said interested opinion does to it:

(1) Montrose and Ducru often sell as second growths. (2) Calon and Saint-Pierre have sometimes sold as third growths, and that is the rank certain connoisseurs assign them.

« (1) Montrose et Ducru vendent souvent comme seconds crûs. (2) Calon et St-Pierre ont vendu quelquefois comme troisièmes crûs, et c'est le rang que leur assignent certains connaisseurs. »

William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853

In 1855 the 2 best-informed men in the Médoc published in the same year and split. D'Armailhacq, walking the commune, reports the trade's verdict against the vineyard: it "produces a wine that was sold, in 1825, like the second growths, and at once acquired a very great reputation. Since then, the trade has refused to keep it in that class, and will admit it only among the thirds." Charles Saint-Amant, walking the same roads the same year for a general reader, reached the opposite conclusion: Montrose "is indeed a second, and in all justice it ought to come before Cos, and it does not sell below it."

That was the state of the evidence when the brokers' union of Bordeaux, the Chambre syndicale des courtiers, drew up the ranking for Napoleon III's Exposition Universelle in Paris that became the 1855 Classification.

Set their Saint-Estèphe against Franck's 1853 edition, the baseline every buyer in the city already owned, and the result is a transcription with 2 corrections. Cos-d'Estournel, Lafon-Rochet, and Cos-Labory stayed exactly where Franck had them. Montrose went up to the Seconds and Calon up to the Thirds. They are precisely the pair Franck had footnoted, each moved in the direction its footnote said the market had already taken it.

The brokers of 1855 did not overrule the reference book. They promoted its footnotes into its table and left the rest of the page alone. The instrument was working, for the last time.

The book that kept asking

Nobody at the time thought 1855 was the end of anything. Danflou gave Montrose a chapter of its own in 1867, handed it the brokers' verdict, "nobly conquered its place among the second growths," and then, closing his series on the Seconds, wrote a forecast:

Here ends the series of the second growths; but, as we have said, we believe the present classification is only provisional, and that the Syndicate, in agreement with the most distinguished enologists and the most authoritative tasters, will soon have new dignitaries to proclaim. Thus Calon, Mr. Lestapis's, Montrose's neighbor, deserves to be put back among the seconds, which it long occupied.

« nous croyons que la classification actuelle n'est que provisoire, et que le Syndicat … aura bientôt à proclamer de nouveaux dignitaires. »

Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais, Bordeaux, 1867 volume

Provisional, and soon. He was describing the system he had grown up inside, in which growths formed and lines moved, and he had just watched it do exactly that to the estate in his own chapter.

In the same volume he did something quieter, and it is the first sign of the damage. He wrote that in 1825 Montrose "took rank among the second growths of the Médoc, a rank it has always occupied with the greatest distinction."

Always. Franck had it a Third in 1845 and in 1853; d'Armailhacq had the trade refusing it the higher class in 1855. The argument had been over for 12 years, and the same writer who expected the next revision was already sanding the last one out of the record. Once the list stopped moving, only the first half of Danflou survived, and it survived everywhere.

Cocks died in 1854 and his directory passed to Édouard Féret, a Bordeaux publisher who issued it for the rest of his working life. For 54 years that directory reprinted a ranking it said, in the same volume, needed to be changed.

Its 1868 preface states that the classification follows the brokers' document textually, and then explains how such a document is supposed to behave: "like all human institutions, this one is subject to the laws of time, and must certainly, at certain periods, be rejuvenated." "Such a growth, neglected by a careless or debt-ridden proprietor, may fall into the hands of a rich, active and intelligent man, and by that alone give better products."

That is a description of what the Dumoulins had done at Saint-Estèphe, written by the people whose job was to keep the register. It stood in the 1886, 1893, and 1898 editions too, with one word strengthened along the way from certainly to necessarily.

It even printed candidates. From 1886 a footnote on a bourgeois growth at Pauillac, Constant-Bages-Monpelou, says its wine "often equals in quality many of the fifth growths, and it is called to re-enter that class at the next revision of the classification," and the same sentence, recast but word for word in substance, is still there in 1922, 36 years later.

The white classification got a running counter. In 1886 it was "made thirty years ago" and in 1893 the number was 37; by 1922 it was 65. Each time the old list followed, printed once more.

What is gone by 1922 is the sentence about the classification being subject to the laws of time. The candidates are still there and the counter is still running. What stopped being printed was the principle, and somewhere between 1898 and 1922 the house that had kept the register for half a century gave it up.

A rank for nobody

Montrose, meanwhile, went on being registered by an instrument that could describe it but could no longer rank it.

The Dumoulins sold over the winter of 1865 to 1866, to a Paris industrialist named Mathieu Dollfus, for 1,050,000 francs. Danflou, writing while the ink was still wet, adds the detail that tells you what the estate had become: it would have fetched 100,000 more if the buyer had hesitated 2 weeks. That is 50 years after the first vines went into cleared woodland, and a delay that short was worth a tenth of the price.

Dollfus went on doing what the Dumoulins had done. By 1886 the directory's footnote on Montrose is about building: 63 hectares in one unbroken block, 50 of them the work of Dumoulin and 13 "won by Mr. Dollfus from uncultivated land."

In 1867 the international jury of Napoleon III's second world's fair gave Dollfus a gold medal for Montrose, in the same list as Lafite, Margaux, Latour, Haut-Brion, and Mouton. In 1855 a rank had been available to record something like that. By 1867 there was none, for Montrose or for anyone. There was a book, saying the list must be rejuvenated, and printing the old table again.

The verdict

Mostly true. For nearly every great estate, the claim holds: time makes the wine. Montrose broke the rule in 40 years, and the exception is the measure of its greatness. What great wine needs is not centuries of vines. It needs an instrument capable of noticing that it has arrived, and before 1855 the Médoc had one, of a kind nobody would design on purpose: a quarrel. Rival handbooks contradicting each other, brokers contradicting their colleagues, footnotes contradicting the tables they sat under, and running through all of it a single test anybody could check, which was what the wine had actually been paid over a long run of years. Then the quarrel was settled, and the settlement stopped the revising and dissolved the test with it. Once the list was official, rank began to set price instead of price setting rank, and the question of whether a wine was being paid like a Second Growth stopped being answerable about anything that was not already one.

There is a serious answer to why nothing has climbed since that owes nothing to lists, and it deserves stating at full strength. The Montrose maneuver needed 3 things at once: first-rate gravel nobody had planted, a family with money, and a reason to believe the effort would be paid for. Phylloxera arrived in the Gironde about 1869, mildew followed in the 1880s, and between them they took the capital and the appetite for building an estate out of woodland. On that view 1855 froze nothing; it is the last photograph taken before the subject stopped moving. How much of the stillness since is the frozen instrument and how much is the louse, this file does not settle, and the honest reason is that the instrument's silence is why we cannot tell. Bordeaux does run one classification that is genuinely revised, at Saint-Émilion, roughly every decade, and it produces demotions, litigation, and estates that withdraw rather than be judged. That is what revision looks like. Nobody should assume it looks better.

Danflou expected new dignitaries within a few years. Féret was still printing candidates for the next revision 55 years later. Both of them are still waiting, and so is Calon.

The wine

Montrose is the Saint-Estèphe I would put in front of anyone who thinks the appellation is austere, and leave it there. The house style is dense, tight-grained, and slow, built for the long haul in a way its neighbor across the road is not: where Cos d'Estournel is upholstered, Montrose is architectural, and in a cool year it can be severe for a decade before it tells you what it is. That is the price of the thing that makes it, and I would rather pay it than not. Jane Anson, in Inside Bordeaux, records that it has "long been seen as the First Growth of St-Estèphe," which is a rank no document confers and everybody understands. Buy the vintages nobody is chasing, give them 15 years, and you will taste what the brokers counted in a vineyard 40 years old.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc et les autres vins rouges du département de la Gironde, 1st edition, Bordeaux, 1824, pp. 129 to 130, the Saint-Estèphe proprietors' table.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, the preamble to the classification, the commune sketch, and the table of quantities and prices for 1833 to 1840.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the classification and its footnotes.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, p. 191.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, pp. 46 to 47.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, pp. 221 to 222 and 242 to 243.
• A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, p. 478.
• Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, the Saint-Estèphe pages.
• Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais : monographies et photographies des châteaux et vignobles, second series, Bordeaux, 1867, chapter 7 of the second growths and the passage closing that series.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, pp. 89 to 92 and 141 to 142, and pp. 430 to 431 for the awards of 1867.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, Bordeaux, 1886, pp. 109, 192, 200 to 204, and 303 to 304.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 6th edition, Bordeaux, 1893, pp. 107 and 339.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 7th edition, Bordeaux, 1898, the classification and the Pauillac footnotes.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, pp. 238 to 239, 244, 259 to 260, and 450 to 451.

Modern scholarship.

• Jane Anson, Inside Bordeaux, Berry Bros. and Rudd Press, London, 2020, the Saint-Estèphe chapter, for the standing of Montrose in its commune.

The estate's own account.

• Château Montrose, the estate's published history, for the purchase of 1778 and the planting of 1815.

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, "Does great wine need centuries?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 05/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/does-great-wine-need-centuries/.

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.