The Five First Growths: Inside the Legend of Bordeaux

In the spring of 1855, on the eve of Paris's great Exposition Universelle, the Emperor Napoleon III asked the wine brokers of Bordeaux to rank the region's finest estates for a curious world. The brokers sorted the châteaux of the Médoc into five tiers according to the prices their wines had long commanded, and at the very summit they placed four estates as premiers crus, the First Growths. Nearly two centuries later, that list, drawn up in a single season, remains the most famous classification in all of wine.

The original four were Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Latour, and Château Margaux, each set among the gravel banks of the Médoc north of the city, joined by Château Haut-Brion, the lone outsider from the soils of what is now Pessac-Léognan to the south. For more than a century they stood alone. Then, in 1973, after decades of patient campaigning by Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Château Mouton Rothschild was elevated to join them, the only change ever made to the 1855 ranking. Mouton marked the moment with a new motto that captured the estate's long frustration and its final triumph, a line about being first now where it had once been merely second.

What unites the five is not a single flavor but a standard. Lafite is prized for its perfume and restraint, Latour for its sheer power and the way it ages for half a century or more, Margaux for its silk and elegance, Haut-Brion for the smoky, earthy complexity that its gravel terroir alone seems able to give, and Mouton for its opulence and the commissioned artworks, from Picasso to Warhol, that have adorned every one of its labels since 1945. In a great vintage, these are wines built for time, evolving slowly in a dark cellar from something dense and closed into one of the most complete experiences the drink can offer. The reputation of each rests as much on the discipline of its winemaking, at estates such as Château Margaux, as on the accident of its soil.

They are also, inevitably, among the most expensive wines on earth. A case of a First Growth from a celebrated year can cost more than a car, and the finest bottles trade like blue chip assets, changing hands at the great auction houses and forming the backbone of every serious cellar. Much of that wine is bought before it is even bottled, through the Bordeaux tradition of en primeur, in which buyers commit to a vintage while it still rests in barrel, hoping to secure the best wines at the earliest price. It is a system that turns the purchase of wine into something closer to investment.

For anyone drawn to that world, the First Growths are the natural place to begin and the surest store of value in wine. Building a cellar around them is a study in itself, from reading vintages to storing the bottles correctly, and it is where the pleasure of drinking and the discipline of collecting finally meet, a subject we explore in our guide to starting a fine wine collection. For those who would rather have the sourcing and the access handled for them, Pampered Pursuit can arrange both; to begin, simply contact us.