THE MEDOC

Are all the wines of Medoc of similar quality? By no means. The district is divided into two areas, the Haut-Medoc and the Medoc. The latter used to be called the low Medoc, but that term somehow sounded derogatory, the vignerons who had holdings there objected strongly, and they succeeded in getting the "low" eliminated. They had a right to feel sensitive, for their wines are good too; yet the best wines of the Medoc are indeed made in the Haut-Medoc section. So. narrowing down still farther, we find ourselves in the Haut-Medoc, which in turn is divided into 28 municipalities called communes. Four of  the best known of the are Margaux, Pauillac, St. Estephe and St. Julien (my personal favorite). Thus a bottle label saying appellation control, and St. Julien, pinpoints the wine as coming from one small commune in Bordeaux where red wines of almost uniformly outstanding quality are produced. There remains only the question of what specific vineyard in St. Julien grew the vine. And for the greatest wines of all, that is all-important. It is traditional in Bordeaux to refer to individual vineyards as Chateau. These Chateau's, incidentally, are not the imposing castles that you will find on the Loire River; they are generally spacious country houses, although some are little more than storage buildings in the vineyards. But whether the building be imposing or modest, the wine that many of the Medoc Chateau's put out is glorious. The owners guard the reputation of their labels jealously-some of them to the point of refusing to put their name on any wine at all if the year should be a bad one; then they sell their whole crop anonymously to a shipper to be blended. This happens rarely. There are a great many Chateaus in Medoc alone, and to settle some the confusion, a committee of Bordeaux wine brokers sat down in 1855 to divide them into five classes. The system is a simple numerical one. The top grade, for example is Premier Cru, which translates literally as "First Growth" but really means "vineyard of the top class."  When someone refers to Chateau Calon-Segur as a third-growth Medoc, which it is, he means that the Chateau produces wines of the third class; they are not quite as superb as those of the first or second growths. Yet even a fifth-growth Medoc is far from a poor wine. On the contrary, it is something special, for out of the hundreds of Chateaus that were rated in 1855, only 62 were deemed worthy of classification. Three were put in the first division: Lafitte-Rothschild, Latour and Margaux; and a fourth Haut-Brion was added, although it is not a Medoc at all but a Graves. So in addition to the warranty of quality supplied by the words appellation control on a Bordeaux bottle, one also has, for the finest wines, the name of the Chateau itself, and such words as mis en bouteilles au chateau (bottled at the chateau), which gives the buyer the assurance that the wine in the bottle was grown in a certain vineyard, by a certain man and bottled right there. The famous Medoc Chateau, along with many others in Bordeaux, owe their fame not only to the excellence of their wines, but also to their large size. Most of the great vineyards of Burgundy, the Rhine and the Moselle are divided among a number of proprietors, some of whom may own only an acre or two in a choice location, and each of whom makes a slightly different wine, following his own counsel. In Bordeaux, properties of 100 and 200 acres in single ownership are not unusual. Chateau Lafitte, for example. contains 150 acres under vine. The wine in all the Lafitte bottles of a given year is identical. This adds immeasurably to the ease with which a Bordeaux lover can pinpoint his favorites.