Bordeaux 2018 Cru Bourgeois at Four Years
The 2018 vintage in Bordeaux was noteworthy not only for its warm weather, and for the cohort of successful if rather atypically styled wines it produced, it was also notable for the revival of the Cru Bourgeois classification.
During the course of more than a decade in limbo, following the 2007 collapse of the classification which was consequent upon legal challenges to the 2003 iteration, keen Cru Bourgeois proprietors had to make do with the Annual Mark of Quality instead. This was effectively a pat on the head from a local tasting committee which effectively said “well done, your wine would be good enough for the Cru Bourgeois classification, if it still existed. You can write Cru Bourgeois on the label this year”.
On a good day, one might say the Annual Mark of Quality was a useful stop gap, one which kept the Cru Bourgeois concept alive. In a less constructive frame of mind you could also argue the annual award was close to meaningless. It was easy to pick holes in both the process and the results.
The fragility of the Annual Mark of Quality construct perhaps incentivised the revival of the classification, and to their credit several hundred interested proprietors banded together and worked in a cohesive fashion to effect just such a change. The Cru Bourgeois classification was eventually re-launched in 2020, and as noted above applied for the first time to the 2018 vintage, bottled and released that year.
The classification is valid for five years after which it will be refreshed. As a consequence, the current listing pertains to wines from 2018 through to 2022. Of these five vintages, at the time of writing the first three have been bottled, and late in 2022 I attended the tasting of all three vintages. This is the first of a trio of reports from that tasting, here focusing exclusively on the 2018 vintage.
