08/06/2026
👋 Hello again! Brannon from Cellar 72.
This week we're pouring something with a little more depth: the Chateau Lascombes Chevalier de Lascombes, a bold wine with an even more robust history behind it.
We're pairing it with an Oxtail Shepherd's Pie, a match made almost too easy by the wine itself.
Let's get into it!
— The Cellar 72 team
🍾 This Week's Bottle
Tasting Notes:
Quite a fragrant nose, really floral and heavily scented with black berry fruit and some red cherry notes. Crisp and chalky, this has a lovely fresh bite and tang to the strawberry fruit, more red on the palate with a clear, crystalline base of powdery minerality. A touch tense in terms of focus but there’s nice softness too, expanding slowly with a long length. An encouraging second wine with some underlying power. Clean and precise. A little toasted on the finish, graphite, cedar, coffee and dark chocolate. 3.70pH. A yield of 35hl/h. First vintage under director Axel Heinz. Julien Viaud consultant. - Decanter
Lightly baked red cherries and sweet strawberries at first, but the slightly baked character gets blown off in the glass as you give it some time, revealing aromas of fresher red berries, hibiscus and minerals. Fruity on the palate but tense at the core, with fresh, fine-grained tannins and a juicy, tight-wound finish. Better from 2026. - James Suckling
Food & Wine Pairing
It's medium-to-full bodied, floral, and spice-forward rather than a blockbuster — so the best dishes lean toward duck, lamb, mushroom, and richly spiced braises rather than heavy steak-and-blue-cheese territory.
Buy Chateau Lascombes Chevalier de Lascombes In Store Here!
But first, a brief history lesson.
The 1855 Bordeaux Classification: 170 Years of Semi-Questionable Rankings
Let's talk about the wine world's most iconic, most unchanged, and honestly kind of questionable ranking system: the 1855 Bordeaux Classification. The wine we are featuring today is classified as a "Second-Growth" or "Deuxièmes Cru" which relates to this list from 1855 in particular. And if you've ever seen a bottle proudly labeled something like this or even "Grand Cru Classé" and wondered who decided that and when, buckle up, because the answer is deliciously, chaotically French.
The Origin Story: A Rush Job for a World's Fair
Here's the thing — this whole system exists because Napoleon III wanted Bordeaux to show off at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle (basically a World's Fair). So the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce needed a flex-worthy list of the region's best wines, and fast. Their solution? Hand the job to the local wine brokers' union and let them sort it out.
And sort it out they did — in about two weeks. The formal request went out on April 5, 1855, and the brokers submitted their full ranking by April 18 the same year (La Fleur Wines (https://www.lafleurwines.com/post/the-1855-bordeaux-classification-part-i-genesis-of-a-market-making-hierarchy) ). No committees, no back-and-forth, just brokers who already knew the region, cold turning in their homework early.
So What Were They Actually Judging On?
Not taste. Not a panel of sommeliers swirling glasses and taking notes. Price. The brokers ranked châteaux almost entirely based on what their wines had been selling for on the open market over the previous decades (Wine Cellar Insider (https://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/bordeaux-wine-producer-profiles/bordeaux/1855-bordeaux-classification/) ). The tiers broke down roughly like this:
First Growth — wines fetching over 3,000 French francs per barrel
Second Growth — 2,500–2,700 francs
Third Growth — 2,100–2,400 francs
Fourth and Fifth Growths — descending from there
The final list covered 58 châteaux: 4 First Growths, 12 Seconds, 14 Thirds, 11 Fourths, and 17 Fifths (Wine Spectator (https://www.winespectator.com/articles/the-1855-bordeaux-classification-3491) ). Almost everything on it came from the Médoc, with one glamorous exception — Château Haut-Brion from Graves, which got a First Growth seat purely because its prices already matched the big names.
The Drama Nobody Talks About
Okay, here's my favorite part. The brokers' original draft didn't just sort châteaux into five tiers — it ranked them by quality within each tier too. Mouton-Rothschild, for example, sat at the very top of the Second Growths. But the reaction to that was, unsurprisingly, heated, so the brokers backpedaled in writing to the Chamber and insisted no internal hierarchy had been intended. Cue an alphabetical shuffle within each class to smooth everyone's feelings over (Wine Spectator (https://www.winespectator.com/articles/the-1855-bordeaux-classification-3491) ).
And then there's Château Cantemerle, the classification's very own Cinderella story. It got left off the original list entirely — not because its wines weren't good enough, but because it had been selling directly to clients instead of going through brokers, so it simply wasn't on their radar. After some very persistent lobbying, it got added as a Fifth Growth in September 1855 (CellarTours (https://www.cellartours.com/blog/france/1855-bordeaux-wine-classification) ). Talk about a glass slipper effect!
Also worth noting: the brokers themselves seemed a little uneasy about the whole exercise. In their reply to the Chamber, they basically said, you know how delicate this is and how many feelings it's going to hurt — before handing over the list anyway (CellarTours (https://www.cellartours.com/blog/france/1855-bordeaux-wine-classification) ).
Why Has This Basically Never Changed?
This is the part that gets me. In 170 years, this list has been formally amended exactly once. Once! In 1973, Château Mouton Rothschild finally got promoted from Second Growth to First Growth, after decades of campaigning by Baron Philippe de Rothschild. There was also a serious attempt at a full revision in 1961 — it went nowhere, reportedly because of the sheer uproar it caused within the Bordeaux trade (CellarTours (https://www.cellartours.com/blog/france/1855-bordeaux-wine-classification) ).
The reason it's stayed frozen isn't really a mystery: the classification ranks the property, not the current wine or winemaking team. So even if a château's quality shifts dramatically over a century and a half, its rank on paper doesn't budge. And the First Growths — the ones with the most to lose — have zero incentive to reopen that conversation.
What This Means for Wine Lovers Today
Hot take of the week: the 1855 Classification is basically a very old, very prestigious relic — not a real-time quality guide. Some Second, Third, and even Fifth Growth châteaux now make wine that rivals (or beats) the First Growths, earning them the nickname "Super Seconds" — think Cos d'Estournel and Léoville Las Cases, which command prices well above their official tier (Wine with Seth (https://www.winewithseth.com/winewiki/1855-classification/) ). This doesn't necessarily mean that all of the wines on the list are of poor quality or taste bad per se, it just means that quality vs brand clout can be a bit ambiguous.
So if you're wine shopping and see a Grand Cru Classé sticker, or in this case "Second-Growths / Deuxièmes Crus," take it for what it is: a snapshot of 1855 market prices, frozen in amber, still shaping who gets to charge what almost two centuries later. You're drinking a piece of French history, one glass (or bottle) at a time.
The One Thing Nobody Can Tell You
And here's the loose thread that started this whole deep dive for me: nobody seems to have a record of exactly who sat on that original broker committee. The sources all just say "the Bordeaux courtiers" as a collective — no names, no minutes, no receipts. For a system this influential, that's a wildly thin paper trail. Make of that what you will. 🍷
And that concludes your irregularly scheduled history lesson with Brannon.
Cheers!
🍽️ This Week's Pairing:
Oxtail Shepherd’s Pie
Recipe By: Chef Kwame Onwuachi (https://www.kwameonwuachi.com/) View Full Recipe Here (https://tamronhallshow.com/blog/chef-kwame-onwuachi-oxtail-shepherds-pie-recipe/)
As the cooler weather is upon us, however brief, there's nothing quite like a dish that makes your whole kitchen smell warm and cozy. James Beard Award winner Kwame Onwuachi — the chef behind Tatiana at Lincoln Center, named the #1 restaurant in New York by the New York Times two years running — brings his Afro-Caribbean roots to this oxtail shepherd's pie, layering fall-apart tender, jerk-marinated oxtail (ginger, allspice, thyme, scotch bonnet) under a blanket of creamy potatoes. It's the kind of dish that tastes like it took all day because, well, it did — but the payoff is a bowl of pure, cozy indulgence.
Pair it with the Chateau Lascombes Chevalier de Lascombes, and the match makes itself. This Margaux second wine is Merlot-driven, with fine-grained tannins, notes of red cherry and hibiscus, and a warm undercurrent of spice and toasty oak — which means it's practically built to meet oxtail's deep, ginger-and-allspice richness head-on. The wine's soft tannins won't fight the meat's fall-apart texture, its bright red fruit cuts right through the dish's richness, and its own spice notes echo the jerk seasoning rather than competing with it. It's an unexpected pairing on paper, but it's exactly the kind of combination that makes a Sunday dinner feel like an event.
Grab a bottle, put the oxtail in the oven, and let the weekend do the rest.
Click here for an update from Cellar 72!
