The 1855 Bordeaux Classification, Part II: How First Growth Status Creates Liquidity and Value
- marclafleur3
- Jan 28
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 30
The investment truth: hierarchy beats scarcity
Production is large; status is larger
This is where wine investment enters the story, not as an add-on, but as the logical conclusion.
Many people assume the top Bordeaux wines are expensive because they are rare. Compared to Burgundy’s microscopic production, Bordeaux First Growths are not “rare” in the usual sense. Their grand vin volumes are large enough to supply the world consistently.
Consider the production reality often discussed in the trade:
Château Margaux averages about 150,000 bottles of its grand vin annually.
Château Latour produces around 18,000 cases of its grand vin in a typical year — about 216,000 bottles.
Château Lafite Rothschild produces around 35,000 cases total, with 16'000 cases on average being First Growth (grand vin) — about 192'000 bottles.
These are serious volumes. And yet these wines sit at the top of global fine-wine pricing.
So what drives value?
Hierarchy. Readability. Reassurance.
Readability as a catalyst of value
The 1855 Classification created a prestige ladder that investors can understand in seconds. A buyer doesn’t need to be a Bordeaux specialist to feel comfortable allocating capital to “First Growth.” The tier itself does part of the psychological work:
It signals historical durability.
It signals global recognition.
It signals resale demand (because others recognise it too).
It signals that the asset will remain “explainable” to future decision-makers: family members, heirs, committees, wealth managers.
This is why classification is a catalyst of value: it turns wine into readable capital. And readability is one of the most underrated engines of price in any collectible market.
From hierarchy to benchmark: why indices keep returning to First Growths
Benchmarks create shared language
A hierarchy becomes even more powerful once it becomes a benchmark.
In the modern fine-wine market, the most widely quoted price indicators still lean heavily on Bordeaux’s top tier. The emblematic example is the Liv-ex Fine Wine 50, which tracks the daily price movements of the Bordeaux First Growths, composed of the ten most recent physical vintages of Lafite, Margaux, Mouton, Haut-Brion, and Latour.
This matters for investors because benchmarks do two crucial things:
They create a shared reference point (the market can “talk” in index language).
They attract capital (because capital likes measuring itself).
Shared language attracts capital
The 1855 Classification is not the Liv-ex methodology, but it is the cultural architecture that made benchmark thinking intuitive. First Growths are the “blue chips” precisely because the world agreed, long ago, to treat them as blue chips.
The classification barely changed — and that’s the point
Stability as an investable feature
One of the strangest features of the 1855 Classification is its stability. Despite wars, phylloxera, changes in ownership, changes in technique, shifts in global demand — the hierarchy largely remains.
Born from an imperial request and assembled by the trade using the only “data” that truly mattered in the 19th century — reputation and price — the classification was never meant to be a philosophical statement. It was designed to be useful, instantly. And that usefulness explains its astonishing longevity.
The rare moments the marble cracked
The most emblematic crack in the marble came in 1973, when Château Mouton Rothschild was finally elevated to First Growth — a rare moment when the official list acknowledged what the market had been whispering for decades.
From an investor’s perspective, this immobility is almost the feature — because stable hierarchies are easier to underwrite. The more a classification behaves like “law,” the more it feels investable.
This doesn’t mean it is always right. It means it is always legible
Does the 1855 Classification still make sense today?
Limits as a quality grid
Is the 1855 Classification a perfect measure of contemporary quality? Probably not — but it was never built to do that job. Napoleon III wanted a commercial instrument, not a technical tasting scoreboard. A hierarchy that could be shown, understood, and exported. And today, it still serves its initial purpose.
One may argue that the Classification is historical, not diagnostic. It was assembled from 19th-century market evidence — reputation and price — and then, for all practical reasons, set in stone. Yet wine is alive. Vineyards evolve, teams change, investment flows in, farming philosophies shift, selections become stricter, and climate steadily redraws the balance of ripeness and freshness. A hierarchy that barely moves cannot fully keep pace with a landscape that does.
The list also implies that greatness is a permanent title rather than a continually earned performance. Over the last few decades, some estates have sharpened their identity and raised their level dramatically; others have had periods of drift, stylistic confusion, or complacency. If you taste widely — and especially if you taste blind — you may experience the occasional gap between ranked status and what is actually in the glass.
Power as market coordination
And what about the methodology? 1855 privileges the château as a brand and a commercial signal. It speaks in tiers and labels, not in parcels and terroir truths. If your instinct is to believe that wine’s highest truth is site-by-site nuance, the classification can feel out of scope, a market map presented as a qualitative law.
And yet, the Classification remains extraordinarily powerful. Even when it may fail as a precise tasting grid for “the best wines today,” it succeeds as a description of something real: an enduring architecture of reputation. And reputation, in fine wine, is not decoration, it’s one of the forces that shapes demand, pricing, and attention.
Consensus, liquidity, navigation
So yes, we can acknowledge its limits as an assessment of quality. But we also have to admit what it does perfectly: it coordinates the market. It dictates purchasing behaviour with remarkable reliability, and that may be what matters most for investors. Capital likes names that require no footnotes, no long explanations, no leap of faith.
In that sense, even if 1855 isn’t a perfect mirror of quality, it remains a remarkably accurate mirror of market consensus. And consensus is what makes an asset liquid. We may profess terroir, uniqueness, and individual truth, but markets tend to pay most for what is easiest to recognize at scale. A classification is not poetry. It’s navigation. Vital navigation.
What wine investors should take from this
Prestige is an economic technology
The 1855 Classification is not simply an origin story; it’s a lesson in how value is manufactured in luxury markets.
Once a hierarchy becomes widely accepted, it starts doing work: reassuring buyers, anchoring prices, attracting demand.
Supply is not the whole story
First Growths are not tiny-production wines. Their pricing power is largely a function of status-tier permanence — and the classification is the foundational reason that tier exists.
Readability creates liquidity
A bottle that can be explained in five words (“1855 First Growth”) trades more easily than a bottle that requires a lecture. And in any investment market, what trades easily tends to command a premium.
The irony is beautiful: a list designed for a world fair became one of wine’s most enduring financial instruments.