Building the Cellar, Part II: Champagne, Burgundy, and the Bottles That Mark a Life
The best wines to collect from Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne, decoded for beginners: how the great classifications actually work, which bottles belong on the table now, and the Black vintners whose labels deserve a place beside them.
In Part I of this series we built the cellar’s architecture — drink now, lay down, prestige. Now we fill it, and the filling begins with the three regions that anchor every serious collection: Champagne, Burgundy, and Bordeaux.
If you are looking for the best wines to collect from Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne as a beginner, the secret is that each region asks a different question. Bordeaux asks who made it. Burgundy asks where it grew.
Champagne asks what the house — or the grower — was trying to say. Learn to hear the three questions, and the most intimidating wine lists in the world become legible, even friendly.
Then, once the classics are in place, we will widen the cellar door: some of the finest bottles now being made carry the names of Black vintners, and a serious table should know them.
Champagne: The House Style and the Grower’s Signature
Champagne is the celebration bottle, but in a cellar it is also a working wine — the aperitif that opens every evening of consequence.
Begin with the legal fact that frames all the rest: as Christie’s — “How to Buy Champagne: An Expert Guide” states, true Champagne must come from the Champagne region in the northeast of France; though sparkling wines are produced worldwide, only those from that region may legally carry the name.
Within it, most Champagne is non-vintage — a blend of several years, crafted to a consistent house style, and therefore undated.
Above it sit the vintage wines, made only in declared years, and at the summit the prestige cuvées, each house’s flagship: Christie’s names Krug Clos du Mesnil, Clos d’Ambonnay, Louis Roederer’s Cristal, Dom Pérignon, and Salon Le Mesnil — and notes, as a measure of rarity, that Salon has released just 39 vintages since it was first produced in 1905.
The beginner’s Champagne cellar needs both poles. From the great houses, keep a standing half-case of a non-vintage brut you love — it is the bottle that asks for no occasion — and lay down vintage and prestige bottles for the years ahead, because, as Christie’s observes:
“Vintage Champagnes have the potential to evolve in bottle and develop honeyed, crème brulée complexity.”— Christie’s, “How to Buy Champagne: An Expert Guide”
And then, do not stop at the famous names. Christie’s same guide notes that in the last decade smaller grower-producers have risen sharply in popularity, particularly among expert collectors who really know their Champagne.
The guide at Rara Vina — “Grower Champagne: An Introductory Guide” explains why: the large houses generally source grapes from numerous vineyards across the region to maintain a consistent house style, while grower Champagne is made by producers from their own grapes — and is therefore all about terroir, the unique character of a specific place.
The collectors’ literature names the grower icons to seek out — Selosse, Egly-Ouriet, Larmandier-Bernier, Ulysse Collin — alongside the houses’ prestige tier of vintage Krug, Cristal, Salon, Dom Pérignon’s late-released Plénitude bottlings, Pol Roger’s Sir Winston Churchill, and Bollinger’s La Grande Année.
A Champagne shelf with a house brut for the week, a grower bottle for the curious, and two prestige vintages asleep for the decade is a shelf that understands the region.
Burgundy: The Pyramid of Place
Burgundy classifies land, not people — vineyard plots called climats, ranked by centuries of observation that began with medieval monks noticing that one slope gave finer wine than the next. The result is a four-level pyramid, and once you can read it, every Burgundy label explains itself.
The guide at Anchored Vines — “Burgundy Wine Guide” lays the tiers out with their shares of production. At the broad base, regional wines labelled simply Bourgogne Rouge or Bourgogne Blanc account for about 52 percent of production — the entry level, highly variable, though a Bourgogne from a great producer can dramatically over-deliver.
Above them, village wines — from a single named commune such as Pommard, Meursault, Gevrey-Chambertin, Chambolle-Musigny, or Vosne-Romanée — represent about 37 percent, and a solid village wine from a good producer is where most serious everyday Burgundy drinking lives.
Then the premier cru vineyards — 635 of them, specifically classified plots within a village, about 10 percent of production — where the label joins village and vineyard, as in Puligny-Montrachet Les Folatières.
And at the summit, the 33 grand cru vineyards, whose labels carry the vineyard name alone — Chambertin, Clos de Vougeot, Le Montrachet — roughly 1.5 percent of production, and home to the most coveted bottles on earth.
The investment guide at VinoVest — “Premier Cru vs Grand Cru” attaches indicative price bands to the same pyramid: regional wines around $15 to $50 a bottle, village wines $30 to $150, premier cru $50 to $500 and beyond, and grand cru from $200 to five figures depending on producer and vineyard. The drinking strategy follows directly.
Drink at the village level, where Burgundy’s character is honest and the prices remain sane; teach yourself at the premier cru level, buying two bottles where Part I’s rule applies; and let grand cru be the prestige tier — the domaine names the collectors repeat (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Leroy, Leflaive, Coche-Dury, Rousseau, Roumier, Mugnier) are bought by allocation and relationship as much as by money, which is precisely why a good merchant matters more in Burgundy than anywhere else in wine.
Two grapes carry the whole region — Pinot Noir for the reds, Chardonnay for the whites — and the Côte de Nuits in the north is devoted almost entirely to Pinot Noir, while the Côte de Beaune unites both and is renowned above all for its great whites. Burgundy rewards the patient and the specific.
It is the connoisseur’s region, and it will happily become your life’s study.
Bordeaux: The Classification You Can Set Your Watch By
Bordeaux is Burgundy inverted: it classifies estates, and it did so in a single famous act.
The 1855 Classification, created for the Exposition Universelle in Paris commissioned by Napoleon III, formalised a hierarchy of Bordeaux estates based on reputation and prevailing market prices — and, as the Hong Kong guide at Corney & Barrow — “Decoding the 1855 Bordeaux Classification” explains, it focused predominantly on the Left Bank, ranking the leading red wine estates of the Médoc alongside Château Haut-Brion in Graves, while also classifying the sweet wines of Sauternes and Barsac.
The five First Growths whose names open every conversation about Bordeaux are Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion, and Mouton Rothschild — the last elevated from Second Growth in 1973, the classification’s one famous amendment.
Below them run Second through Fifth Growths — a fixed ladder of estates that a beginner can actually learn, which is Bordeaux’s great gift to the new collector — the hierarchy is printed, stable, and priced transparently in every market on earth.
But the map has a second half, and the finest bottles on it were never classified at all. The Right Bank — Saint-Émilion and Pomerol, across the Gironde — was excluded from 1855 entirely, not from any judgement of quality but because those appellations had not yet achieved the same commercial prominence in the trade of the time.
Saint-Émilion later built its own classification, revised roughly every decade so estates can rise and fall on current performance; Pomerol has never adopted a classification at all — which makes the eminence of Pétrus, its Merlot-based summit and one of the world’s most collectable wines, a pure verdict of the market and the glass.
Cellar Tours — “Understanding the Importance of the 1855 Classification” adds the useful context that the ranking was built from reputation and price history rather than tastings — and that the classified estates have sustained their standing through the investment and commitment to fine winemaking that their prices support.
For the cellar, the practical shape recommended by the collectors’ literature puts Bordeaux at the foundation: classed growths from strong vintages, bought in depth, with Right Bank estates chosen on a merchant’s guidance — the wines engineered, above all others, for the long sleep of Part I’s second tier.
The Bottles That Mark a Life
Which brings us to the prestige shelf, and the real subject of this series. A cellar’s deepest pleasure is not rarity; it is correspondence — the bottle whose year matches the year that matters. The birth-year bottle, bought young and opened at twenty-one.
The anniversary case, one bottle a year from the same vintage as the marriage. The Champagne laid down at a child’s christening and poured at their graduation.
Buy these the way The Luxury Playbook — “The Wine Regions Every Serious Cellar Includes” advises serious cellars to be weighted — roughly thirty to forty percent Bordeaux, twenty to twenty-five percent Burgundy, ten to fifteen percent Champagne — and buy them in the formats and vintages that will still be singing when the day arrives: classed-growth Bordeaux and premier cru Burgundy for the decades, vintage Champagne from the great houses for the celebrations, and Sauternes, that most patient of wines, for the longest horizons of all.
These are not investments that happen to be drinkable. They are dates in a family’s history, kept in the dark at 55 degrees until their moment. No portfolio statement has ever been opened with tears of joy.
These bottles are.
The Black Vintners to Know
A cellar that tells our story cannot stop at the Gironde. Begin in Napa, with Brown Estate — the first Black-owned estate winery in Napa Valley.
The story, as the profile at The Sophisticated Life recounts it, begins in 1980, when Dr. Bassett and Marcela Brown bought a dilapidated 450-acre property and rehabilitated it, planting Zinfandel they sold to local winemakers; in 1995 their children — David, Coral, and Deneen Brown — decided the family would make the wine itself.
Zinfandel remains the estate’s specialty, with Cabernet Sauvignon and Petite Sirah beside it. It remains, that profile notes, the only Black-owned estate winery in Napa Valley — and its wines, praised for their quality and their balance, hold their own in any cellar in this series.
Then the sisters.
The McBride Sisters Wine Company, founded by Robin McBride and Andréa McBride John, produces wine from vineyards in California and New Zealand across three collections — the McBride Sisters Collection, Black Girl Magic Wines, and SHE Can Wines — and is described by Black America Web — “7 Black-Owned Wine Brands To Sip On” as the largest Black-owned, women-led wine company in the United States.
The same survey introduces Maison Noir Wines, founded in 2007 in Oregon by sommelier André Hueston Mack, sourcing grapes from the Willamette Valley for everything from Chardonnay to Pinot Grigio, with a mission stated simply: make wine fun and accessible for seasoned enthusiasts and weekend sippers alike.
The honour roll at Local Wine Events — “Honoring Black Winemakers” widens the cellar further: Theodora Lee of Theopolis Vineyards, crafting award-winning Petite Sirah in California; Phil Long of Longevity Wines, founder of one of the few Black-owned wineries in Livermore Valley and president of the Association of African American Vintners; Bertony Faustin of Abbey Creek Vineyard, Oregon’s first Black winemaker; Iris Rideau of Rideau Vineyards, the first Black woman to own a winery in the United States; and Ntsiki Biyela of Aslina Wines, South Africa’s first Black female winemaker.
That survey counts more than 130 Black-owned wineries in the United States alone. Stock them the way you stock Bordeaux — by tasting, in twos, with the book kept — and your cellar becomes what it should have been all along: a record of excellence, wherever it is made.
Meet the owners behind the wider world of Black food enterprise in our Food Owners profiles, and see how wine sits among the other treasures in The Vault: Wine as an Asset.
Building the Cellar, Part I: What to Drink Now, What to Lay Down
The Vault: Wine as an Asset
Food Owners — Black Excellence Profiles
The Best Tables in America: How the Five-Star Room Actually Works
Christie’s — “How to Buy Champagne: An Expert Guide”
Rara Vina — “Grower Champagne: An Introductory Guide”
Anchored Vines — “Burgundy Wine Guide: How to Read the Label and Find Value”
VinoVest — “Premier Cru vs Grand Cru: The Complete Guide to French Wine Classifications”
Corney & Barrow Hong Kong — “Decoding the 1855 Bordeaux Classification”
Cellar Tours — “Understanding the Importance of the 1855 Classification in Bordeaux”
Black America Web — “7 Black-Owned Wine Brands To Sip On”
Local Wine Events — “Honoring Black Winemakers This Black History Month”
The Sophisticated Life — “Black-Owned Wineries in Napa and Sonoma”
The Luxury Playbook — “How to Round Out a Serious Wine Cellar”
The Luxury Playbook — “The Wine Regions Every Serious Cellar Includes”
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