Château Cos D'Estournel, 2025
Château Cos D'Estournel, 2025
- 75cl
- 13.5%
- Red Still
- Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot
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Optimal drinking window: 2033 - 2065
Est. delivery in 2028.
Château Cos d'Estournel stands apart in Saint-Estèphe with its exotic pagodas and equally distinctive wines. This is Left Bank classicism with a twist of oriental spice, built from prime gravelly soils that sit almost opposite Lafite across the Gironde.
What the critics say:
"Ethereal in its purity and very beautiful. Cos is a little intimate, drawing you in with that dark graphite, a hint of cedar, a little pencil-shaving, copious dark berry fruits and a little cherry; but there's also, crucially, that heathy, wild herb and – here – floral note, the signature of this northern Médoc appellation. I find this incredibly pure texturally, cool at the core and spherical in form, with great density and a sensation of viscosity that is rare in the vintage. I'm almost in tears. This has that slightly sombre, haunting elegance that I think we will associate with the greatest wines of this vintage over the years to come. Incense and myrrh replace the sweet spices of old. Energetic and dynamic in its freshness. Beautiful. Sublime."
"Intense and fruity wine, deep and dark with peppery fruits and Asian spices. This is a very crispy and pleasant wine, with a strong and powerful structure and a massive tannic though well integrated backbone. It would need considerable cellar time , 7-9 years before being approachable. It is a very successful wine both for the chateau and for the vintage."
The Cos vineyards sit on a raised ridge of deep Günzian gravel over clay-limestone subsoils on the border of Saint-Estèphe and Pauillac, close enough to Lafite that the two estates share a boundary stone. This gravel warms quickly and drains freely, encouraging deep root systems that access the cooler clay beneath during dry summers. Saint-Estèphe's slightly heavier soils compared to Pauillac and Saint-Julien give its wines a firmer tannic structure and a distinctive cool, mineral salinity that sets Cos apart even from its immediate neighbours.
Saint-Estèphe is the northernmost of the four great communes of the Haut-Médoc and the least celebrated of the four, which is frankly an opportunity. Its clay-rich soils produce wines that tend to be firmer and more tannic in youth than Pauillac or Saint-Julien, with a savoury, sometimes austere character that opens slowly but rewards patience more generously than almost anywhere in Bordeaux. The appellation contains five classified growths, of which Cos D'Estournel and Montrose are the most celebrated, and it retains a slightly wilder, less-polished reputation that suits the wines rather well.
The 2025 Bordeaux vintage emerged from one of the most demanding growing seasons in recent memory — the earliest budbreak since 1989, June temperatures second only to 2003 since records began, and an unusually early harvest beginning in August for the whites. Conditions that should have produced heavy, overripe wines. They didn't. Decanter's Georgie Hindle, who tasted close to 200 wines ahead of the formal campaign, describes "exceptional concentration, aromatic purity and a freshness that contradicts the record-breaking heat.
The early critical consensus places 2025 stylistically between the precision of 2020 and the structure of 2016, with the brightness of 2023 — a combination that suggests a very serious vintage indeed. Yields are dramatically low, the smallest crop since 1991, with production across the Gironde running around 15% below the five-year average. The quality is here. There simply isn't very much of it.
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