What Michelin published

Five criteria for rating wine estates. Cellar technique, identity, balance and consistency — and ahead of all four, agronomy: soil vitality and vine health.

What we are not claiming

That Michelin endorses us, or we them. Two guides built the same two-part test from opposite ends without consulting each other. That is convergence, not partnership.

Read the citations · 9 min

On 7 July 2026, in the Palace of the Dukes of Burgundy in Dijon, the Michelin Guide announced it would start rating wine estates. Ninety-four of them in Burgundy: nine at three grapes, twenty at two, thirty-three at one, and thirty-two more listed as Selected. The interesting part isn’t the list. It’s the criteria, and specifically their order.

The First Thing Michelin
Looked At Was the dirt

(5)Five criteria published.
Agronomy listed first.

Free Bacchus JournalIndustry · 23 August 2026

There are five. Technical mastery in the cellar. Identity, meaning the honest expression of a terroir. Balance across acidity, tannin and alcohol. Consistency from one vintage to the next. And, first, agronomy: soil vitality and vine health.

A company that began publishing in 1900 to persuade Frenchmen to drive far enough to wear out their tyres, and which has spent the 126 years since becoming the most trusted arbiter of where to eat on earth, has now moved into wine. And it opened by looking at the ground.

Before the cellar, before balance, before consistency across vintages: soil vitality and vine health. That ordering is the whole story.

What they actually wrote about the winners

Criteria can be decorative. What tells you whether a guide means it is the language it uses when describing the estates it rewards, and here Michelin was unusually specific.

Of the nine estates awarded three grapes, five are credited explicitly for their farming in Michelin’s own citations. Cécile Tremblay in Morey-Saint-Denis is described as practising organic viticulture. Dugat-Py’s very old massal-selection vines are noted as grown biodynamically. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s twenty-eight hectares of grand cru are recorded as farmed biodynamically. Lalou Bize-Leroy is called a pioneer of biodynamic viticulture, and her four hectares at Domaine d’Auvenay are described as cultivated biodynamically with absolute precision.

It continues down the tiers. At two grapes, Dujac is credited with seventeen and a half organically cultivated hectares, and Dureuil-Janthial with soils cultivated without herbicides. At one grape, Henri and Gilles Buisson are named as pioneers of organic viticulture in Burgundy as early as the late 1940s. Among the Selected estates: Sylvain Pataille farming fifteen hectares biodynamically with ploughing by animal traction, Domaine Felettig taking its first organic certification with the 2024 vintage, Camille Thiriet and Maxime Cottenceau farmed organically, Jobard-Morey guided toward organic practice with a stated focus on soil health.

One entry stopped us. Domaine Berthaut-Gerbet is described as farmed without herbicides according to non-certified organic practices.

That sentence is, almost word for word, the construction our own standard uses for Track B: a producer farming cleanly who has chosen not to certify, assessed on documented practice rather than on paperwork. We wrote that framework because the alternative was excluding growers who farm better than some certified estates. Finding the same distinction in a Michelin press release, arrived at independently, was a genuinely cheering morning.

Farmed without herbicides according to non-certified organic practices. That is our Track B, in Michelin’s own words, reached by a different route.

Two routes into the same vineyard

Here’s what we find most interesting about all this, and it isn’t a rivalry.

Michelin arrived at farming from the opposite direction to us. Their entire institutional history is judging results — a plate of food, a finished dish, the thing in front of the guest. A century and a quarter of assessing outcomes. And when they decided to rate wine estates rather than individual bottles, that method ran into its own limit. You cannot assess an estate on results alone, because an estate is not a result. It’s a set of practices that produce results, year after year, in weather nobody controls. So they worked backwards from the glass until they reached the soil, and put it first.

We came the other way. Free Bacchus starts at the farming: certification checked against the body that issued it, or documented chemical-free practice where no certificate exists. That’s our first question. And it immediately ran into its own limit, which is that clean farming does not guarantee good wine. A producer can do everything right in the field and make something nobody wants to drink. So we added the second requirement — quality corroborated independently, by critics and competitions with no stake in the farming — and hold producers below threshold when it isn’t there.

Michelin started at the table and worked back to the field. We started in the field and worked forward to the glass. Both of us discovered that one half doesn’t stand up without the other, and both of us built the same two-part test from opposite ends.

That’s not competition. That’s convergence, and convergence is how an idea stops being a niche position and becomes simply how the category thinks.

They worked back from the glass until they reached the soil. We worked forward from the soil until we reached the glass. Same test, opposite directions.

The Overlap

Ten estates we had already verified

Michelin rated ninety-four Burgundy estates. We list twelve producers in Burgundy, and eleven of them are in that selection — ten carrying a grape rating, including three of the nine awarded the full three. The pips below are Michelin’s rating; the chip is ours. Neither guide consulted the other.

Domaine Cécile Tremblay Morey-Saint-Denis Gold Domaine Leroy Vosne-Romanée Gold Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Vosne-Romanée Reserve Bonneau du Martray Corton Gold Domaine Dujac Morey-Saint-Denis Gold Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet Reserve Domaine des Comtes Lafon Meursault Gold Domaine Roulot Meursault Gold Domaine Trapet Gevrey-Chambertin Gold Domaine de Montille Volnay Gold

Ratings verified against Michelin’s own release, 7 July 2026. Of the two estates we list without a grape, Domaine Pierre Morey appears in the Selected list for Meursault; Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair does not appear in the selection at all.

What each side is actually for

The two things are also good at genuinely different jobs, which is worth spelling out rather than pretending we’re doing the same work.

Michelin has reach and cultural authority we will never have and shouldn’t pretend to. People plan holidays around that guide. A three-grape rating will send visitors to Burgundy, put estates on lists in cities that have never carried them, and give a Saint-Aubin grower the kind of attention that changes what they can charge and therefore what they can afford to do in the vineyard. Gwendal Poullennec’s framing of the exercise was that excellence is not defined solely by the prestige of a name, and the selection bears that out: alongside Romanée-Conti sit estates founded in 2003, in 2016, in 2018, and a young grower in Montagny who took over vineyards previously run by the local cooperative.

What we do is narrower and more boring. We publish a methodology, check certifications against issuing registries, record which expressions a certificate actually covers, and print our own corrections when we get something wrong. Nobody plans a holiday around that. It’s plumbing.

Assessment and verification are different tools. Michelin is making a judgement, which requires expertise and taste and the confidence to stand behind it. We are checking a claim, which requires a registry number and the patience to look it up. A category needs both, and the two things are considerably more useful together than either is alone. A guide that tells you an estate farms well, and a standard that can show you the certificate behind it, are answering two halves of one question.

Michelin makes a judgement. We check a claim. Those are different jobs, and a category short of attention needs both.

The problem every guide inherits

Within days of the announcement, Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux in Vosne-Romanée asked publicly to be removed from the selection. The estate has had a policy since the 2020 vintage of not submitting wines for press reviews or ratings, and it applied that policy consistently: it hadn’t asked to be assessed, and would rather not be listed.

We have no criticism to make of Michelin here, because the tension is inherent to the entire idea of a guide. When Sébastien Bras asked to be released from the restaurant guide in 2017, it wasn’t because Michelin had done anything wrong. It was because being rated by somebody else, without having volunteered, is an uncomfortable position for anyone who takes their own work seriously.

And we should say plainly that we’re in exactly the same position. Free Bacchus assesses producers who have not applied to us. We think that’s defensible — an assessment nobody can buy their way into is worth more than one they can, and the moment producers pay for listings the whole thing is worthless. But it does mean rating people who never asked, and anyone uncomfortable with Michelin doing it should be equally uncomfortable with us.

The only real protection is to publish the reasoning so a producer who disagrees can point at the specific thing they think is wrong. That’s why our methodology is public. It’s a reasonable thing to want from any guide, ours included.

One piece of our own housekeeping

Michelin’s move into wine has a consequence for our arithmetic that we want to record here rather than quietly absorb.

Michelin bought a forty percent stake in Wine Advocate in 2017 and acquired the publication outright two years later. Wine Advocate is one of the sources we use to corroborate quality, and it’s an excellent one. But it now shares an owner with the Michelin Grape Selection.

Our standard requires quality to be corroborated independently, and independence means what it says. If we were ever to treat a Michelin grape rating and a Wine Advocate score as two separate confirmations, we’d be counting one company twice and calling it corroboration. So we won’t. Where both appear for the same producer, they count as a single source, and a second confirmation has to come from somewhere with a different owner.

This isn’t a complaint about Michelin, who have been entirely open about the acquisition. It’s a note about us: the ownership map underneath wine criticism is consolidating, and a standard that depends on independent sources has to keep track of who owns whom. We’d rather publish that adjustment than have somebody find it.

Two ratings with the same owner are one source. That’s arithmetic, not an accusation — but it is our arithmetic to get right.

Why more attention is the point

It would be easy for a small verification platform to greet the arrival of the most powerful brand in hospitality with something other than enthusiasm. We don’t feel any.

Wine is in a genuinely difficult period. Consumption is falling in most established markets, younger drinkers are drinking less, costs are rising for growers, and the organic conversion pipeline that expanded through the 2010s has stalled and in places reversed. What the category is short of is not opinions. It’s attention, and specifically attention paid to the people doing the difficult agricultural work rather than to the people with the most recognisable labels.

Michelin can generate that attention at a scale nobody else can. If a three-grape rating sends people to Burgundy, and the Burgundy conversation includes soil vitality and vine health because Michelin put it first, then a great many drinkers are about to encounter the idea that farming determines what’s in the glass — possibly for the first time, and from a source they already trust.

Our hope is a simple one, and it’s the same thing Harry’s Wine asked for when he wrote about the guide last month: that the grapes travel beyond the famous names. Jura, Swartland, Etna, the Finger Lakes, Naoussa. Recognition creates visibility, visibility creates visitors, and visitors are what let a small grower invest in the vineyard rather than merely survive another vintage in it.

The habit

If you take one thing from the guide, take the ordering of the criteria rather than the list of winners.

The most trusted assessor in hospitality, entering wine for the first time, decided that the first thing worth knowing about an estate is the condition of its soil and the health of its vines. Not the score, not the appellation, not the price. The dirt.

So the next time you’re deciding between two bottles, you have permission from an unimpeachable source to ask the question first rather than last. How was this grown? It’s the question Michelin put at the top of its own list, and it’s the one we exist to help you answer when the label won’t.

Michelin put the soil first. That’s a good enough precedent for anyone standing in front of a shelf.