Cru Bourgeois de Medoc looks to 2030 classification following major overhaul

By Jo Gilbert

Published: 18 November, 2024

A new era for the Cru Bourgeois de Medoc was on show at last week’s central London tasting where the trade and press were invited to taste wines from 2022 – the last of five vintages classified in the current 2020 classification and the first vintage to be blind tasted and included in the analysis for the upcoming 2030 classification.

The Cru Bourgeois de Medoc association, which currently represents 250 members, is now ‘reclassified’ every five years.

Producers must go through a stringent re-application process to maintain their status in the hierarchy, which now spans three levels (Cru Bourgeois, Cru Bourgeois Supérieur and Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel, officially introduced in 2020), by submitting wines from five vintages into a blind tasting.

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By spanning five vintages, the association is able to view “a photograph of the style being produced”, vice president Armelle Cruse (pictured) told Harpers, adding that producers “cannot hide behind a single vintage”. Prior to 2020, producers were required to submit one vintage every year.

The 2025 classification will be announced early next year and will cover the vintages from 2023 to 2027 for the Châteaux classified. The 2025 classification is based on a new blind tasting format consisting of five earlier vintages: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. The 2030 classification blind tasting then takes over, beginning with assessment of the 2022 vintage.

The past decade has certainly seen a lot of change for the organisation which was formalised in 1932, but has roots stretching back to the 15th century.

In 2016, members approved the specifications of a completely new structural hierarchy: producers and their wines would be re-classified every five years into the historic categories of Cru Bourgeois, Cru Bourgeois Supérieur and Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel, from the 2018 vintage onwards. Over a decade in the making, these changes were finally ratified in 2020.

According to Cruse, it has been quite a journey. She was candid about the dissatisfaction among the ranks of many who felt their re-classification under the new system was unjust. There were also legal issues to be ironed out, notably with regard to who was on the board making decisions, and the potential conflicts of interest to emerge.

However, she is confident in the justification for the new structure, which she maintains was important to “differentiate in terms of quality”.

As of 2020, the association has 180 producers under the Cru Bourgeois header, 56 under Supérieur and 14 under Exceptionnel. This will likely change next year, when the updated classification is announced. This year, all wineries have had to re-apply by submitting their five vintages alongside technical and commercial information. New wineries will likely join the fray too.

“Everything can happen,” says Cruse. “We will have probably have new members, while producers can be downgraded or upgraded. It’s a tough, serious process.”

The Cru has roots going back to the 15th century when the ‘bourgeois’ began to acquire the best plots in the Médoc. The prices of these various wines were established for the first time in 1740 in a document drawn up by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce. The parameters were further defined in 1858 when 248 Crus Bourgeois were unofficially divided into three categories, after a suggestion to incorporate the crus into the 1855 classification was nixed.

Looking ahead, there are challenges. The climate is obviously one of the most significant. Every year brings issues such as hail, frost, heat or mildew. Then, there is the challenge of distribution and how to juggle Bordeaux’s increasingly hot summers and red-leaning production base with a growing consumer preference for white wines.

“We need to make more drinkable wines with less tannins,” says Cruse. “To stay in fashion and the way of drinking. As we know, a lot of young people are drinking beer.”

For now at least, there is room to celebrate the 2022 vintage, which Cruse described as a “very nice” year. Almost magically, “Everything was in place with the climate. We had a lot of concentration in the grapes; a really successful year in Bordeaux. We would love to have 2022 every year,” she concluded.

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