Brokers, châteaux and egos: the story behind the 1855 classification

The following in an extract from Bordeaux Legends (Abrams 2013), Jane Anson’s book on the First Growths of Bordeaux. A detailed overview of the process, plus recent tasting notes from each of the levels of the 1855 ranking can be found here.

The view from Daniel Lawton’s office, overlooking the river Garonne in the district of Chartrons, has barely changed in over 160 years. It was from this window, with its alcove seat and leaded glass panes, that in 1855 Daniel’s great grand-father Jean-Edouard Lawton would have watched the wines destined for the 1855 Paris Exhibition leave Bordeaux. Railways had begun to operate in parts of France from the 1830s, but Bordeaux was to lack a direct rail link to Paris until later in the century, and the wines needed for the exhibition are likely to have been initially loaded onto a boat, taken up the coast of France towards Normandy, and then carried by road and rail over to Paris from one of the closer ports.

The offices, at 60 Quai de Chartrons, afforded Jean-Edouard and his younger brother William a ringside seat, just a few metres from the quayside, which at the time would have been throbbing with tall merchant ships moored up along the docks. When the tricky Garonne tides allowed a safe berth, négociants would have stood alongside the boats, directing small bands of dock workers unloading sugar, spices, coffee, teas, indigo and other imported goods, mostly coming from Saint Dominique, Martinique and Guadaloupe. In turn, France would have been sending out flour, brass fittings for furniture, textiles, china and wine.

At this mid-point of the 19^th century, Bordeaux was flying. It was the busiest port in France and its merchants had largely replaced nobles and parliamentarians as the most important social group in the city. Their merchant ships would daily approach the city by the broad Gironde Estuary, sailing down past the Médoc, navigating past the confluence of the Dordogne and Garonne rivers at the Bec d’Ambès and continuing the final 20 miles into the city itself, where they would dock before the stone warehouses and offices of the wealthy Chartrons business quarter.

The Lawtons, as wine brokers, were part of the city’s elite, joining the ship-owners, sugar importers, slave traders and wine exporters who had grown rich on the port activity. Together they formed a large, prosperous and influential commercial class. Although things had been difficult for several decades following the French Revolution, by the mid 1800s, they had regained their footing.

All of this meant that it was inevitable that the Lawton family would play a key role in deciding which Bordeaux wines should be displayed at the 1855 Exposition Universelle, held at the Palace of Industry in Paris to underline what Napoleon III saw as the rebirth of France as a great European nation.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that our knowledge of the 1855 classification would have remained sketchy – snatches in the Lawton diaries, forgotten documents in chateaux out-buildings, newspaper back-issues in municipal archives – if it wasn’t for an American historian, Dewey Markham Junior. Over the course of four years from 1993 to 1997, he unearthed the primary sources and pieced them all together for the definitive book on the event, A History of the Bordeaux 1855 Classification.

A native New Yorker with a Masters in cinema from NYU’s School of the Arts, Markham’s father was a renowned vaudeville actor and regular on the Ed Sullivan Show. With a background so far removed from the parochial halls of Bordeaux, he might not seem like the natural choice for world expert on this ancient French classification. But it was precisely to this sense of being an outsider that he credits his success in convincing chateaux to open up their archives to him, despite their collective belief that there simply wasn’t enough information available to write an accurate portrayal. ‘They just believed that I’d never find anything, and what was the harm in letting me have a look around?’

What he found, however, was that this dusty old classification was just as much a nest of hornets for the First Growths in 1855 as Pierre Perromat found it to be in 1972, when Baron Philippe de Rothschild was campaigning for his promotion.

At first glance, the 1855 ranking lay far away from ego, personality clashes and dynastic rivalries. Classification was very much for the trade, not for the public, and there was no idea of how important it would become for wine lovers in later years. It was simply reflecting the prices reached by Bordeaux estates in the marketplace, and compounding a number of earlier rankings drawn up over the centuries. This latest was expected to be just another one of many more to come.

Markham noted Guillaume Lawton’s classification, adding it to sketchier ones beginning in the mid 1600s, and reaching something of a high-point with Thomas Jefferson’s letters back to his brother-in-law in 1787. In one of these, Jefferson named the original four First Growths as being the highest classed wines of Bordeaux, around 80 years before the official classification (although he wasn’t the first – in 1723, one English importer, sounding like a country vicar tucking in to some freshly-baked cakes, wrote ‘the four topping growths of La Tour, Lafite, Chateaux Margaux and Pontack are exceedingly good’).

Few could argue, looking at the figures quoted in courtier’s books, and on merchants ledgers in Bordeaux and London, that prices of the four original First Growths had been singled out for at least 150 years before 1855, and in the case of Haut-Brion nearly 200 years. Their prices had been used to set the value of each year’s harvest, and were usually released first as a test of what the market would bear in terms of pricing other wines of the region.

But look a little closer, and a more colourful picture emerges. Firstly, by 1855, Bordeaux had suffered a few decades of financial upheaval, and even the First Growths were feeling the pinch. Haut-Brion was perhaps worst affected by the financial crisis – this was when Eugene Larrieu was in charge, and he was finding it hard to find sufficient funds for investment in the vineyard. One observer noted that Larrieu had ‘harvests piling up in his cellar’.  But Haut-Brion was not alone, which is why in the Lawton ledgers, you see Latour and Margaux selling their wines ‘by subscription’ in the years leading up to 1855.

This meant that for a period, usually of ten years, the entire harvest was sold at a fixed price – Margaux from 1844 to 1852 to a consortium of négociants for 2,100 francs a tonneau, while Latour from 1844 to 1853 was sold to Barton & Guestier, at 1,750 francs per tonneau. The prices of the Firsts (with the exception of Lafite) were more unstable than they had been for decades, with Haut-Brion dipping below the others. At the same time, the price of Mouton was rising.

The 1851 harvest is a case in point. The vintage was a good one, and in June 1852, Mouton owners turned down merchants’ initial offers of 1,700 francs per tonneau, and asked for 2,000. A few months later, they sold three tonneaux at 2,400 francs, so closing the gap with the other First Growths (only Lafite was selling high at this point, at 3,000 francs per tonneau). ‘Now that experience has taught us that Mouton continues to sell well by waiting a little, it must never again be sacrificed’ wrote Laurent Fould, a member of the Thuret family that owned the estate, and one of the main forces behind the desire for promotion. ‘I am every day more convinced of the enormous differences between Brane-Mouton and the second growths.’

A third tranche of the 1851 vintage, in 1853, sold for 3,000 francs per tonneau, bringing parity with Lafite. Eventually it sold for 3,800 francs.

In 1853, the Thurets sold Mouton to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, and he succeeded in achieving 5,000 francs per tonneau for the opening price of the 1853 vintage, again in parity with Lafite.

‘This was the first time,’ writes Markham in his book, ‘that a Second Growth had dared to achieve parity with the Firsts, and the exploit… gave credence to the arguments that… perhaps the four First Growths should now be five.’

None of this, however, was at first considered for the Paris Exhibition. The request sent from Paris was simply for a display of wines presented without identifying labels, to represent the best the region had to offer. The Chamber of Commerce was given the task of organising the display, working out of the same limestone building on Place de la Bourse that it does today.

Two calls to winemakers for samples were met with less than enthusiasm, but eventually the Chamber of Commerce managed to claw together 23 red wines and 10 white wines to be submitted to Paris.

The next task was deciding how to present the wines, to liven up a rather lackluster display of bottles. The mayor of Bordeaux at the time (and a winemaker himself), Lodi-Martin Duffour-Dubergier, was asked to create a map showing the location of the main chateaux in the region. To add further interest to the map, he decided to show the classified growths, in a clear and readable form – and to come up with this list, he contacted the Union of Brokers on April 5, 1855, asking for a list of all red classed growths in the department ‘as exact and complete as possible.’

The board of directors at the Brokers’ Union comprised six men in total, drawn from different trades in Bordeaux, from insurance to commodities trading. The only wine broker was Charles-Henri-Georges Merman, head of a brokerage firm that had operated in Bordeaux since the early 19^th century. Undoubtedly he will have looked at his own records, consulted previous classifications, and spoken to his compatriots such as Jean-Eduard Lawton. Two weeks later, the 1855 classification – on April 18, 1855 – was delivered to the Chamber of Commerce.

So far, so simple. The Chamber of Commerce had already sent off its samples to Paris, and there was no correlation between the wines sent up and the wines in the classification. As Markham points out, there had been no chateau visits, no requests for tastings, no samples… and nor was there any need for them, as the courtiers already knew all that they had to. A job well done, as Merman may have remarked to his contemporaries with quiet satisfaction.

First Growth Exception
The First Growths, however, had their own ideas. Once he learnt of the intended display, Chateau Lafite’s then-manager, Monplaisir Goudal wrote to the Chamber of Commerce to ask if they could display their wines with the chateau’s own label.

It was Monplaisir’s father Joseph who had pursued the policy of making Lafite the highest priced of the First Growths. Also a courtier, he changed its market from Holland to England, where wines could reach higher prices, and worked the broker system to ensure it was sold for the best possible price. When his son Monplaisir joined the family firm in 1826, he spent half his time at Lafite, and half at the broker’s office, but all energy focused on keeping the price high – ensuring the vineyard was in top condition, and that the reputation for quality was as high as possible. He travelled out to meet customers himself, sold direct in some cases, and avoided any long-term contracts with negociants. In 1855, one writer said, ‘Commercially, Lafite is placed the first wine of the Médoc, and the only one which, for ten years, had the incentive to improve its quality, because its sales are depending on it….’

Goudal was keen to present the 1846 and 1848 vintages at the exhibition, as he had plenty of stocks of these and wanted to sell them, and he wasn’t prepared to accept the prices that Bordeaux merchants offered. He told the Chamber of Commerce that he would send three bottles of each vintage to the municipal warehouse for transport to Paris, but asked for labels listing the names of Sir Samuel Scott as owner and Monplaisir Goudal as manager.

The powers that be (essentially mayor Duffour-Dubergier) politely declined, but Goudal was not prepared to take no for an answer. He took his request to the top, and arranged a visit in Paris with Napoleon Jerome, President of the Imperial Commission for the Universal Exposition. It seems Napoleon Jerome was convinced by Goudal, and wrote a letter to Bordeaux stating ‘the producer has the right to be compensated before the merchant… the proprietors will have the right to indicate on their samples the name of the wine with their own’.

The Chamber of Commerce had no choice but to agree, but stipulated that they would still write the labels themselves, to maintain a consistent-looking display. In frustration, Goudal withdrew Lafite from the official stand completely, choosing instead to take a separate location where they could display their own wine with their own label. With similar concerns, Eugene Larrieu of Haut-Brion also decided to present his wines apart from the main display. Margaux, Mouton and Latour, meanwhile, toed the party line.

This brings us to one of the enduring myths of the ranking. At the closing ceremonies of the Universal Exposition, held on November 15, 1855, the Gironde’s classified wines received prizes. In line with the classifications, Margaux, Lafite and Latour received First Class medals – in that order, as Margaux received 20 out of 20 in its tasting, while the other two received 19. Separately, Lafite was rewarded with its own first class medal, and Monplaisir Goudal received two honourable mentions both as a worker and as an exhibitor – so his tenacity very much paid off, but the idea sent down through the ages that Lafite was ‘first of the firsts’ was not exactly true.

As Haut-Brion did not submit a sample to the Chamber of Commerce, they insisted that the chateau was not mentioned specifically by name, although it did get an honourable mention for its own display, and was still listed in the ranking as First Growth.

Catch up on a recent tasting of these wines here.