Bordeaux cut its prices by a third and nobody in America noticed. The $23 bottle is the one to buy.

Short answer: the question is whether Bordeaux, the most famous expensive wine in the world, can be a bargain, and the answer is that it has been one for two years and almost nobody in an American store has noticed, because the headlines are about Lafite and the bargain is three shelves down. The Château Blaignan 2019, a Médoc cru bourgeois at $23, is the find. The second wine of a classed growth at $30 as a future is the flex. And the $150 bottle is still $150 too much.

What happened

Every spring the top châteaux sell the previous year’s wine as futures, two years before it is bottled, and the prices they set are the stock ticker of the whole region. In the spring of 2025 the ticker fell off the board. Against the 2023 vintage, Lafite cut 31 percent, Mouton 25, Cheval Blanc about 30, Figeac 37 and Pavie 41, and the trade still did not want the wine “at any and all price points,” in the words of one post-mortem. The spring of 2026 was not better. Zachys is offering the 2025 Lafite at about $460 a bottle while the 2022 sits on the market at $650, and Ducru-Beaucaillou at $125 against $240.

Underneath the famous names it is worse. The Liv-ex 100, the index of the wines rich people trade, fell 9.1 percent in 2024, and Bordeaux is most of it. The region has about 110,000 hectares of vines and has been paying growers 6,000 euros a hectare to rip out 9,500 of them, nearly a tenth, because the French drink half the red wine they did a generation ago, China stopped buying, and the prices of the 2010s ran away from the wine. On top of all that, every European bottle now lands in America with a 15 percent tariff on it.

A region in that condition does not raise prices. It takes what it can get. And what it can get, at the bottom of the pyramid where nobody is watching, is less than the wine is worth.

Why the bargain is not where you are looking

Bordeaux has sixty-odd châteaux whose names you might know and about five thousand you have never heard of. The sixty set the headlines, and even after the cuts they are expensive; a third off $650 is still $460, and a bottle of Lafite was never going to be a bargain in this life. Do not go looking for the reset at the top.

The five thousand are where it is. Their prices never went up in the boom, because nobody in Shanghai was bidding for Château Blaignan. What did go up, quietly, over twenty years, was the quality of the wine, because the climate got warmer and ripened grapes that used to be green, and because the consultants and the sorting tables that the rich châteaux paid for in 1995 cost nothing to copy in 2015. So the small estate in the Médoc makes a better wine than it did when you were young and sells it for the price it charged then, to a market that has lost its two biggest buyers. Jancis Robinson has said for years that the best value in Bordeaux is in the crus bourgeois, and this is the first time in my working life that the shelf agrees with her.

How to read the label in ten seconds

Bordeaux labels look alike on purpose. Three things on the front tell you everything.

The place. “Bordeaux” or “Bordeaux Supérieur” means the grapes came from anywhere in the region, which is the size of a small state; it can be very good and it is never expensive. “Médoc,” “Haut-Médoc,” “Graves,” “Côtes de Bordeaux” mean a district. “Saint-Estèphe,” “Pauillac,” “Margaux,” “Saint-Émilion Grand Cru” mean a village, and the village is what you pay for. At $25, a district on the label is the sweet spot: better dirt than the regional bottle, none of the village premium.

The class. “Cru Bourgeois” is a real thing, a classification of Médoc estates re-judged every five years, and at $20 to $30 it is the best word on any French label. “Grand Cru Classé” is the real thing in Saint-Émilion. “Grand Cru” on its own in Saint-Émilion means much less than it sounds, and “Grand Vin de Bordeaux” means nothing at all; anyone may print it, and the ones who do are usually the ones who need to.

The year. 2019, 2020 and 2022 are strong across the board; buy them without tasting. 2021 and 2024 were cold and wet, and the small estates, which cannot afford to throw grapes away, suffered more than the big ones; taste before you buy a case. 2025 is being offered as futures now and the early word is very good, which is why a $30 future from a classed-growth estate is worth your attention for the first time in a decade.

What to do with the bottle in front of you

All of these are on wine.com this week, and every one of them is cheaper than it was.

Château Blaignan 2019, Médoc, $22.97. The find. A cru bourgeois from the best year of the decade, marked down from $45, with four critics at or near 90. This is a wine that tastes like Bordeaux, cedar and cassis and a dry finish, at a price that tastes like Chile. Drink it over the next six years.

Château Pey La Tour Réserve 2020, Bordeaux Supérieur, $25.97. The one to buy by the case for a dinner party, 91 points from two serious critics, from a house that makes a lot of wine and makes it carefully. Ready now, fine for five years.

Clarendelle 2018, $24.97. Made by the family that owns Haut-Brion from grapes that did not make Haut-Brion. Fair, not a find; you are paying four dollars for the family name. But it is an honest, mature Bordeaux ready tonight.

Le Marquis de Calon-Ségur 2025, Saint-Estèphe, $29.97, as a future. The flex. The second wine of a classed growth, 94 points in barrel, at a price the first wine’s owners would have laughed at in 2019. You wait two years for it. In a year like this, that is the deal. Château Fombrauge 2025, a Saint-Émilion Grand Cru Classé, is $29.97 on the same terms.

Château Haut-Riot Cuvée Juliette 2022, $14.99. Fair. A plain Bordeaux from a great year, 90 points from Decanter, for the price of a $12 Pinot that is a quarter something else. Weeknight wine with a pedigree.

The $150 bottle. Still $150 too much, and now you know the owners agree with you.

If the label is a wall of French and you cannot find the district, photograph it and ask me. I know which year was wet and which word means nothing, and I will tell you in a sentence whether the $25 is a cru bourgeois in disguise or a “Grand Vin” in need of a buyer.