Bordeaux wines listed as Grand Cru Classes have been classified as such dating back to 1855.
It is summer now, with warm weather and brilliant sunshine, ideal for easy evening strolls and picnics outdoors. Outdoor concerts, village fetes and barbeques are now the order for weekends.
Bordeaux
As a break from researching scientific papers about food science, I have started rummaging around in my cellar and resorted to drinking some of the older wines lying around there, with an idle intent to explain when I am sober, for example, the differences between Bordeaux wines classified as ‘Grand Cru Classés’ and ‘Cru Bourgeois’.
And for wines from the Médoc region, this is reasonably straightforward. Basically, all the wines defined as Grand Cru Classés were selected in 1855 for the Exposition Universelle in Paris that year at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III.
The selections were done by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an esteemed body founded in 1705, with a lot of profound expertise in wine appreciation. It must have been a hard job, but the French oenologists and sommeliers diligently and finally assembled a list of their top wines, suitable for inclusion in the Exposition Universelle. There were 61 red wines and 27 whites selected and they have been setting standards for much of the top wines of France ever since.
The red classifications start at the top with five Premiers Crus, 14 Deuxièmes Crus, 14 Troisièmes Crus, 10 Quatrièmes Crus, and 18 Cinquièmes Crus. For the whites, there were one Premier Cru Supérieur, 11 Premiers Crus, and 15 Deuxièmes Crus.
Over the centuries, only one revision to the original lists was deemed necessary, when Château Mouton Rothschild was promoted from the rank of Deuxième Cru to Premier Cru in 1973.
A single round of classifications made in 1855 is of course inadequate to reflect the many hundreds of new vineyards and wine producers that came along and established themselves afterwards, and in 1932 the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce and the Gironde Chamber of Agriculture decided to create a new designation called “Cru Bourgeois”.
Quality red wines from Bordeaux are a personal favourite of the columnist. — DIOGO BRANDAO/Unsplash
This involved dutifully tasting hundreds of wines from different vineyards in the Médoc region and selecting between 240 to 260 red wines each year which qualify for the classification. This arduous work has now been assumed by the Alliance des Crus Bourgeois, which publishes their official selections in September each year.
So that is the immediate difference: all Médoc wines with the Grand Cru Classé classifications are fixed (probably forever) and wines with Cru Bourgeois have to qualify for the classification each year. But the important similarity is that all wines with Grand Cru Classé and Cru Bourgeois designations tend to age very well, often reaching their drinking peak 10 or more years after bottling. I certainly would not open any such wines too early, and it is a struggle sometimes to resist breaking open crates which are less than 15 years old.
There are also other Grand Cru Classé wines, which are not based on the 1855 classification. These would be other top wines from various parts of Bordeaux, and the region the label refers to would always be shown with the classification, such as ‘St Emilion Premier Grand Cru Classé’. These are fine wines which are required to have their own chateaus with specific wine cellars and reviewed and renewed periodically; in St Emilion, the review happens every 10 years.
There is another Grand Cru classification which are for historically located vineyards in the region. They can sometimes be even better than some Grand Cru Classé wines, a label which they do not qualify simply because they do not have their own chateaus and cellars. And then there are other fine wines which simply do not bother with the hassle of classifications.
I am quite fond of quality red wines from Bordeaux, and this is a personal preference, though it is hard to explain why. One reason may be because I can taste the earth and minerals in good wines from the region.
There is a unique hint of alluvial minerality in fine reds from Médoc, and one can sometimes even smell this when standing on the banks of the expansive Gironde River in the villages north of the town of Bordeaux, especially in the early hours of a misty morning. The Gironde River is formed after the confluence of the Garonne and Dordogne rivers, and clarets are red wines produced from vineyards on the left of the Gironde River.
An alternative explanation might be poor memory and laziness. Many wines from Burgundy are remarkably good but I admit to having a little problem keeping track of them all as there are 585 wines from the region designated as Premier Cru with another 32 classified as Grand Cru. Still, there are a few bottles of red Burgundy in the cellar, purely for research purposes.
A simple clafoutis
If you have any spare fruits, and I mean fruits that are not too watery (e.g., watermelon, papaya, etc), then here is the simplest recipe I can think of to make a lovely dessert. Any kind of seasonal, reasonably ripe fruit would work with this clafoutis recipe, including cherries, apricots, strawberries, blueberries, figs, peaches, apples, etc. It is a great way to create a delicious dessert from any excess or leftover fruit.
Traditional clafoutis is made with unpitted cherries with a custard mixture added to it. — CHRIS CHAN
Clafoutis comes from an old French word, ‘clafir’ which means ‘to fill’. This dish originated in the region of Limousin, France, and was already a favourite by the 19th century.
Traditionally, a real clafoutis is made with un-pitted cherries where the oven heat causes the cherry pits to exude an intriguing almond flavour, but nowadays, bakers usually remove the cherry pits and add fine ground almond powder instead. When made with fruits other than cherries, the dish is technically called a ‘flaugnarde’, though some French restaurants just call them ‘fruit clafoutis’.
So, to make a clafoutis or flaugnarde, you just need the following simple ingredients and equipment, plus an oven:
20-25 ml of cream (18% fat or more)
2-3 eggs (depending on size)
1 tsp vanilla essence
80g sugar
20-25g of fine almond powder
Cherries or fruits to fill baking tray (chopped into medium chunks if required)
Butter, used only to grease the sides of a baking tray
Baking paper (cut to just cover the base of the baking tray)
Baking tray, inside base diameter of 24-25cm (if using a silicon sleeved tray, then you do not need butter and baking paper)
Start heating the oven to 180°C.
While waiting for the oven to heat up, beat the cream, sugar, eggs, almond powder, and vanilla essence together in a bowl. Once you think you have beaten everything well enough, mix again for another minute to ensure the custard is really smooth.
If not using a silicon sleeved tray, grease the sides of the baking tray with a bit of butter and place the baking sheet at the bottom.
Scatter the fruit pieces evenly into the baking tray, ensuring the tray is well filled. Pour the custard mixture on the fruit and ensure that it flows in between all the fruits.
Place the baking tray in the oven at 180°C and bake for 40-45 mins, rotating the tray 180 degrees after 25 minutes or so, to ensure even baking.
Final notes
Personally, I prefer to leave a clafoutis or flaugnarde to cool, then left in the fridge overnight and served as a chilled dessert the next day as the custard would then have firmed up a bit. But it is also quite delicious warm as well.
Flaugnarde is essentially made using fruits other than cherries. — CHRIS CHAN
As always, the recipe is flexible, and you can reduce or increase the amount of sugar, or change flavourings with the dish, perhaps using pandan essence instead of vanilla essence to give it a tropical zing. But if you want to use pandan essence, then it is probably best made with tropical fruits such as banana, mango, jackfruit, star fruit, etc.
To be honest, it is often probably not the prettiest dish to serve, and that is because it tends to disintegrate when taken off the baking tray and fruit juices often ooze and mix with each other messily on the surface. However, to make pretty clafoutis, it is very simple. Just bake them in ramekins (or small flat-bottomed bowls) and serve each ramekin as an individual dessert, dusted lightly with icing sugar. As it is an easily adaptable recipe, you can also add some flour and milk to the custard mix to make a thicker, denser clafoutis. I just prefer my clafoutis smooth and light.
One can, of course, also choose to enjoy a sweet, chilled bottle of, say, Château Nairac from the Barsac region in Bordeaux with clafoutis, but a cheaper bottle of Monbazillac would do just as well. And it took only a dozen clafoutis to figure this out.
The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
