The 2025 cru bourgeois reclassification part 3: an evaluation and an appreciation

In the third part of his analysis on 2025 cru bourgeois reclassification, db's Bordeaux correspondent Colin Hay evaluates a representative sample of the wines, noting the quality of panel’s deliberations and being impressed by the consistent value for money that these wines represent even in current market conditions. The troubled recent history of the classification and the current challenges of the global fine wine market have not made life easy for those seeking to make the case for the value of a competitive system of classification for the wines of the Médoc. The result, as the second part of my analysis sought to explain, is that the 2025 edition of the cru bourgeois reclassification contains many fewer wines than its predecessor, with many of its most prominent ‘leavers’ coming from the ranks of the former crus bourgeois exceptionnels. But that, I would argue, has little or nothing to do with the quality of the evaluation process that today determines the classification, so now, I turn to more practical questions. What do these wines taste like? How good are they? Are there credible and consistent differences between wines graded cru bourgeois, cru bourgeois supérieur and cru bourgeois exceptionnel? In short, has the reclassification exercise been well done and is the resulting classification worth the paper on which it has so recently been rewritten? To answer these question I turned to the guardians of the classification, l’Alliance des Crus Bourgeois de Médoc. I invited them to provide me with what they regarded to be a representative sub-set of the wines of the new classification. I insisted that they choose the wines but include within the sample they sent wines at each quality level before and after the reclassification and from each appellation. All wines were tasted in Paris from Zalto and Grassl stemware in January and February 2025, just before the unveiling of the new classification at Vinexpo in Paris. My tasting notes and ratings appear below, arranged alphabetically in appellation groups. To be clear from the outset, this is an indicative and not in any sense a scientific test of the classification system. It could not be and was never intended to be anything other than that. My sample size is small, it is in the end far from truly representative (and random, I imagine, only in the sense that I did not choose it!) and the wines all come from a single vintage. My evaluation is also of the wines themselves and not in any sense of the conditions of their production, the respect for the environment they exhibit nor, of course, the property’s valorisation of its terroir, history and culture (all of which are integral to the jury’s more holistic assessment). It is also, crucially, my evaluation – a personal evaluation and the evaluation of an individual – and not of a panel of experts. It has nothing like the authority of that of the panel itself and draws on nothing even vaguely resembling their collective wisdom. But it is revealing nonetheless I think – not least in that it leads to a much more positive and unequivocal evaluation of the reclassification exercise than my previous reflections on the difficulties of making a competitive system of classification work in Bordeaux today. Indeed, to cut to the chase, in respect of each and every one of the above question my assessment is rather more positive and rather less equivocal that it was in the first part of this pair of articles. Today’s crus bourgeoisie taste like they come from the Médoc; they are well-made and of a high and consistent quality; they represent excellent value for money; and the classification is an effective mechanism and credible guarantor of all of that. The bottom line is that the consumer can buy these wines with confidence without knowing anything very much about the property itself. Second, and perhaps no less significantly, standards have been maintained despite the smaller number of wines in the 2025 edition of the classification and the higher proportion of classified wines at cru bourgeois exceptionnel level. When I conducted a similar assessment after the 2020 classification exercise with 16 similarly selected wines, my ratings ranged from 86-93, with an average of 90.16. Here, after the 2025 reclassification, my ratings range from 87-93+, with an average of 90.30. The three-tiered banding in the classification is also largely confirmed (certainly as well confirmed as one might expect it to be with this kind of a sample size). My ratings for the new crus bourgeois exceptionnels range from 88 to 93+, with an average of 90.86, for the new crus bourgeois supérieurs from 89 to 92+ with an average of 90.75 and for the crus bourgeois from 87 to 88 with an average of 87.3. Considering that my evaluation was of a small sub-set of the wines in the classification and was based on tasting alone and of samples taken from a single vintage, that is a pretty decent match. It merely confirms my sense that the reclassification exercise was exactingly and exhaustively conducted to a very professional standard by seasoned professionals working within appropriately set guidelines. What is particularly pleasing to note is the stylistic diversity of the wines classified at the two upper levels – the crus bourgeois supérieurs and exceptionnels. We have lush, plush, plump wines with lots of substance, body and a fair degree of oak. But we also have refined, elegant, ethereal wines with shimmering mid-palates that express the terroirs from which they hail in a rather different way. The capacity to reward such diversity is a very good thing and I suspect something that was actually in rather shorter supply when the 2003 classification was established. Finally and perhaps most crucially, every single one of these wines is well-made and expresses both the identity of its appellation and the terroir or terroirs from which it is crafted. That again would not have been the case in 2003 (or, at least, not to the same extent) and it reminds us of the transformation that has occurred both in the vineyard and in the cellar throughout Bordeaux over the last 2 decades. For all the full tasting notes, click here.