Bordeaux 2016 Cru Bourgeois
The Cru Bourgeois system as it stood when I started drinking wine had never really been ratified. Any estate that declared itself a Cru Bourgeois was doing so based on a classification drawn up by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce and the Gironde Chamber of Agriculture in 1932. The fly in the ointment was that this list had never received ministerial approval, and so it was perhaps open to question. An attempt by the Syndicat des Crus Bourgeois du Médoc in 2003 to update the system, dividing it into three quality levels, and of course to attain the relevant minster’s sign-off, led to the classification’s collapse.
Revivified in 2008 by the renamed Alliance des Crus Bourgeois du Médoc, the new classification began life as an annually renewed ‘within vintage’ classification. There are all sorts of problem with such a system, as I have already explored in detail in my 2010 Cru Bourgeois and 2011 Cru Bourgeois reports. Now five years on from writing those articles I am delighted to report that under the direction of president Olivier Cuvelier, and with the support of the majority of the Alliance’s members, the Cru Bourgeois system is evolving once again. This year’s annual list of wines concerning the 2016 vintage, the ninth to be published, is to be one of the last. In 2018 the again renamed Union des Crus Bourgeois du Médoc was granted permission to develop anew the internal quality hierarchy, reintroducing the three rungs, the middle-ranking Cru Bourgeois Supérieur and the crème de la crème, Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel, atop the entry-level Cru Bourgeois. More significantly, it will be a five-year classification, the ranking set to be reviewed twice each decade. The first such five-year classification will be revealed in 2020, and will be partly based on (and applicable to) the vintages from 2018 through to 2022 inclusive. The system will then be reviewed and the new ranking published in 2025, for the vintages 2023 onwards, and so on, every five years.
The annual assessments have been a vital part of the revitalisation of the Cru Bourgeois system, but this shift to a five-year system is a move in the right direction. A classification system should be about consistent quality and effort over time, through the good times and the bad times (by which I mean good and bad vintages), not about the success of an individual wine or vintage. Will the annual tastings also end at that point, I wonder? I expect not, as they have now become a valuable event in the annual tasting calendar, affording these too-easily overlooked châteaux, some of which produce wines of remarkable quality and value, a much needed moment in the spotlight. But we shall see….
