Château Cos d'Estournel 2024

Critic scores

• James Suckling97-98
• Vinous95-98
• Wine Advocate93-95
• Jeb Dunnuck93-95

The 2024 vintage in Saint-Estèphe

Vintage benchmark: 87/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A rainy spring and a difficult flowering reduced the crop; the dry October saved fine, light, easy-drinking wines.

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

Cos d’Estournel seduces with its aromas of licorice and raspberry, its velvet texture and its heady character without heaviness. The palate is very powerful in attack, the middle is continuous, its structure gives it a lot of length and a racy finish.

Blend of the 2024 vintage

Figures from the 2024 sheet

• 55 yrsVine age
• 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.