Wine Critic
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Château Cos d'Estournel, Saint-Estephe, 2eme Cru Classe 2019
Second Growth. Deuxieme Grand Cru Classe in 1855.
Expert tasting note: (2019 vintage)
"The wine has a deep, dark, almost opaque ruby-red color. Aromas are of ripe, raisined, dark fruit, with earthy touches. There is a lovely freshness that lifts the palate. The fruit has a ripe, black-cherry nature & is a touch earthy & toasty. Alcohol is balanced. The tannins are fine grained & the structure is rounded & smooth, giving a little mouth-watering grip to the juicy dark-cherry fruit on the finish." - 10/23 DCAMW
Robert Parker The Wine Advocate
The 2019 Cos d'Estournel has turned out brilliantly, exhibiting aromas of minty cassis, sweet wild berries and wild plums mingled with hints of spices, loamy soil and potpourri. Full-bodied, broad and enveloping, it's polished and seamless, its ample chassis of fine, velvety tannin entirely concealed in its deep core of succulent, crunchy fruit. Beautifully integrated at this early stage, the last decade has witnessed a number of changes at this address, including a trend toward less aggressively late picking, cooler fermentations and élevage with fewer rackings and more moderate percentages of less heavily toasted new oak: in 2019, the results speak for themselves.
Cos d'Estournel may neighbor Lafite-Rothschild, but its vineyards are very different, rising from the banks of the Jalle de Breuil—the small stream that divides Pauillac and Saint-Estèphe—to a height of fully 26 meters above sea level. Cos's clay-gravel vineyards occupy the plateau on top, as well as straddling the slopes, scrolling round the hillside from the east-facing holdings overlooking Lafite to fully south-facing holdings that look out over the Gironde. It's surely this variety of expositions—as well as an average vine age of 55 years—that lend the wine its completeness and plenitude. Soil studies, undertaken in 2003, inform parcel-by-parcel farming and winemaking, as well as replanting, where Cos's important percentage of Merlot is gradually tending to diminish. The last two decades have witnessed considerable evolution: herbicides were banished and experimentation with cover crops began in 2002; a new gravity-flow winery was built in 2008; and winemaking and picking dates have evolved. In the past, the wines sometimes flirted with extremes; but in pushing the boundaries, sometimes one exceeds them. Today, harvest is a touch earlier than was the case a decade ago; fermentation temperatures are cooler and the wines racked less frequently; and percentages of new oak are both much more modest, in 2019 amounting to only 55% (mainly from Taransaud, Fraçois Frères and Berthomieu) and, above all, much less heavily toasted. The result? Wines of greater textural refinement and more vibrant fruit flavors, with as much intensity of flavor and persistence as ever. I suspect, what's more, that today's more reductive élevage will see them age very well indeed. Proprietor Michel Reybier is surely proud that two decades of unremitting investment in quality are today consistently delivering some of the Médoc's very finest wines.
- Reviewed by: William Kelley (97/100)
