Home > Wine Guides > Bordeaux Wine Guide > Sélection Officielle Cru Bourgeois 2008

Sélection Officielle Cru Bourgeois 2008

The history of the Cru Bourgeois designation in Bordeaux has been a troubled one in recent years. A well-meaning revision of the classification in the early years of the 21st century led to one legal challenge after another, and as would happen with any system so dogged the eventual outcome was its collapse. For a more detailed history, see my account of the Cru Bourgeois classification.

Although a painful process, from the classification's ashes arose a new system, an annually renewed selection of wines deemed worthy of the Cru Bourgeois designation, the process overseen by the Alliance des Crus Bourgeois du Médoc. The process begins for each vintage with defining two committees, one for the Médoc and one for the communal appellations. These committees determine the quality level for the vintage in question, and set the criteria by which the wines are to be judged. Each property submitting a wine will be visited to establish eligibility, which once agreed can be suspended or withdrawn as deemed necessary following unannounced spot-checks of the estate.

Eligible estates must then submit their wine for assessment at a mutually agreed time and date, the wines drawn from tank or barrel and bottled. They are than blind-tasted by a panel of four or five "professional tasters" appointed by the committees and briefed on the quality of the vintage and what to expect of the wines. The means of the scores generated by each taster is then used to set a bar for the vintage; those wines which achieve a score equal to or higher than the mean are designated Cru Bourgeois, whereas those scoring less may not use the term.

The 2008 Vintage Selection

I have listed the successful wines for the 2008 vintage here, according to commune. The eagle-eyed will notice that of the châteaux previously classified as Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel, such as Chasse-Spleen, les Ormes de Pez, Potensac and Poujeaux, none make an appearance in this listing. The proprietors of these estates have decided to create their own, breakaway group, Les Exceptionnels. Sociando-Mallet is as absent as ever, proprietor Jean Gautreau maintaining his aloofness wherever and whenever the words Cru Bourgeois are mentioned. And the absence of other names I would expect to see included here, such as d'Angludet and Fourcas Hosten, is suggestive that participation in the new system has not been universally undertaken.