Château Cos d'Estournel 2014

Critic scores

• Wine Enthusiast97
• Vinous95
• Jeb Dunnuck95
• Wine Advocate94

The 2014 vintage in Saint-Estèphe

Vintage benchmark: 90/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A gloomy summer redeemed by an Indian summer: the cabernets are radiant and the freshness is true to the Médoc.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Saint-Estèphe. An estate can depart from it sharply, in frost or hail years, where two neighbours did not make the same vintage. What this particular wine actually gave is on its technical sheet and in the scores above.

Tasting

When tasting, we are as if enchanted by this wine whose complexity captivates us,” says Dominique Arangoïts, Technical Director. The aromas are revealed in a crescendo, a sign of the depth of the wine. We are in the presence of a formidable wine, both accessible very early and with strong potential for evolution.

Blend of the 2014 vintage

Figures from the 2014 sheet

• 225,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Use of a cooling tunnel supplied with liquid CO2. Small truncated conical and insulated stainless steel tanks.

Ageing

18 months in stave oak barrels. 20 to 80% new oak

Terroir

The word 'Cos' means, in old Gascon, 'the hill of pebbles'. The hill of Cos indeed raises, on the banks of the Gironde, an impressive accumulation of Quaternary gravels, torn from the distant mountains of the Massif Central and the Pyrenees and deposited on the limestone bedrock of Saint-Estèphe by the retreat of the primordial river. Shaped by erosion into well-drained ridges, these exceptionally deep gravels constitute a genuine geological curiosity and one of the world's most precious terroirs: they oblige the mature vines planted on their crests to send their roots very deep into the arid soil.