What are the 5 First Growths of Bordeaux?

Three in Pauillac, one outside the Médoc

Three of the 5 stand in Pauillac, one appellation of about 1,220 hectares. That is 3 First Growths from 7.5% of the Médoc (opens in a new tab)’s vines.

Why Haut-Brion is on the list at all

Because the brokers ranked the wines that sold highest, not the wines of a district. The Classification of 1855 (opens in a new tab) was drawn up from their own sale records for the Paris exhibition, and the Médoc supplied every red growth but Haut-Brion. Haut-Brion was the exception nobody could leave out.

It stands south of the city, in the Graves (opens in a new tab), and it had sold among the first growths for most of a century and a half. Samuel Pepys drank it at the Royal Oak tavern in London in 1663, before the great Médoc vineyards had been built up. It had also lost the rank once. In 1832 André Jullien, a Paris wine merchant, wrote that for several years it had been quoted only among the seconds. It took back its place among the firsts, he wrote, after the harvest of 1825.

When Pessac-Léognan was carved out of the Graves in 1987, Haut-Brion went with it. So the only First Growth outside the Médoc carries an appellation that did not exist when it was ranked. It stands on a second list too, the Crus Classés de Graves (opens in a new tab), drawn up in 1953.

What 1973 changed

Mouton Rothschild was a Second Growth for 118 years, and Baron Philippe de Rothschild (opens in a new tab) spent the last 51 of them arguing it should not be. 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). After years of petitions, in 1973 Jacques Chirac, then minister of agriculture, signed the arrêté, a ministerial order that moved Mouton up.

The label answered once more: Premier je suis, second je fus, Mouton ne change (first I am, second I was, Mouton does not change). The promotion remains the only change of rank the list has ever made.

The only other formal change is Cantemerle (opens in a new tab), added in September 1855 after being left off the brokers’ list of April. Other changes happened only in print. Dubignon (opens in a new tab), a Third Growth, disappeared from the printed lists in the 19th century without a decree, and 1 Léoville became 3 on the printed page. The list ranks names, not soil, and it has been formally changed only 2 times since 1855. Nothing in law fixes it forever; the promotion of 1973 took a minister’s signature. That it can never move is habit, not law.