Comparing Cos d’Estournel wines: 2000 to 2016

Jane Anson reports on the second growth's evolution in style and provides fresh tasting notes on wines going back to the Bordeaux 2000 vintage - available exclusively for Premium members.

One of the best views of Château Cos d’Estournel comes from the dining room of its neighbour Lafite Rothschild.

Framed by the window, the sandstone pagodas that mark the St-Estèphe 2^nd Growth are unmissable through the gentle rising vineyards that stretch between the two, their exotic shapes a reminder of founder Louis Gaspard d’Estournel’s obsession with India.

The story goes that d’Estournel himself was standing in…

…pretty much the same spot in 1811, in the vines at Lafite, when he looked back at his own land and decided to create a grand cru from the few plots he had inherited in 1791.He built the château to mark his ambition, and the shape of its spires gave him the name the Maharajah of St-Estèphe.

Less well known perhaps is that he died a ruined man in 1853, and so never got to see his estate ranked a 2^nd Growth.

Today owned by luxury hotel magnate Michel Reybier, Cos has an allure all of its own, a slice of glamour and exoticism among the Médoc powerhouses.

Cos led the way in ultra-fancy new wineries, unveiling its gravity-fed version back in 2008, back when cranes in the Médoc were a relatively rare sight.

It marked a new level of ambition that has continued climbing ever since, even if the château has had its own fair share of drama, with staff changes including the loss of Jean-Guillaume Prats to LVMH (now at Lafite) in 2013 then his replacement Aymeric de Gironde just last year.

Along the way it has produced vintages that divided critical opinion such as the 2009 (Reybier told me during this year’s en primeur that it was the vintage that marked the wine, not any choices made in the winery or vineyard, something that is open for debate).

And yet Cos has always been Cos – one of the great names of Bordeaux, and one of its most sought-after wines.

The best way to put all of this into perspective is through opening a few bottles.

For this vertical, I tasted 17 vintages of Cos d’Estournel back to 2000, together with a few key years of Les Pagodes de Cos and two of the white wine Cos d’Estournel Blanc.

Tasting alongside me were technical director Dominique Arangoïts, white wine maker Angélique Meynieu (who since 2017 has also taken over the reds) and Reybier’s son Raphaël, who is taking an increasingly prominent role since the departure of de Gironde.

To get to know these wines is to understand why precision is the new watchword of great Bordeaux estates.

The new winery has here been used to brilliant effect, allowing a lighter touch with extraction, extreme temperature control even during the moving of grapes into the vats, and careful fractioning out of press wines.

The changes since Reybier arrived in 2000 are worth recapping.

One of the first things he did was carried out an extensive study of the soils and how they regulate water, and in 2004 further studies measured resistivity to more precisely examine moisture content, temperature and depth to bedrock.

Since 2005 the vineyard – which is made up largely of deep gravels, with pockets of clay – has been divided into ever-smaller plots, going from around 60 to over 100.

Picking now takes place on an intra-plot level, with the outlying vines picked separately from those in the centre of the plots for example.

Understanding the soils to this level perhaps helps them to analyse better what happened in 2009 according to Arangoïts.

‘We know that our vines can react extremely quickly to the elements and that we need to be careful about picking dates. The terroir at Cos is extremely reactive and powerful’.

A fascinating thought, particularly when put together with the choices made on a viticultural level.

The biggest story in recent years is that they have backed away from being too interventionist in the vineyard, and it has been to the benefit of the wine.

To explain what I mean, sometimes it’s the simplest things that tell the most illuminating stories – just look at the yields as recounted by Arangoïts.

‘Back in the 1990s, we had relatively high yields of 50hl/h or more, but by 2000 yields were down to around 45 hl/h, before dropping steeply from there.

‘We green harvested in 2000 until 2009, dropping often 50% of the fruit in the vines, and got down to 28hl/h in 2008. Then we began to question if we needed to do that. Now it is back up to 40 or 45hl/h.

‘We no longer have the same worries about ripening Cabernet Sauvignon as before, and slightly higher yields are also a natural way to control the alcohol levels.’

All of which suggests that the soils of Cos are powerful enough on their own, and don’t need an extra nudge of concentration by overly-low yields.

A further freshness has been introduced by leaving small amounts of stalks in the wines (or rather they don’t remove any further stalks after the second sorting of the grapes in the cellar).

My only slight hesitation was the whites. When the Cos Blanc launched I loved the Loire-style sculpting of it, but it has moved away from that model in recent years.

The fruit is from vines up in the Jau-et-Dignac commune of the Médoc (bottled as AOC Bordeaux Blanc), pretty much the most northerly white vines in Bordeaux, and they benefit from estuary breezes that are particularly marked at this spot.

This makes for huge potential for great whites, but I was surprised to feel that 2007 had held up almost better than the 2014.

There is still plenty to recommend – they are gourmet, rich whites with plenty of personality and clearly have a healthy lick of signature Cos glamour, but have sacrificed a touch of that earlier sculpting freshness.

The reds were a revelation, over-delivering on my already high expectations.

Fantastically consistent, with a few approaching perfection.

The Pagodes needs around five years before drinking, although some vintages will easily last for 20 years, such is the quality of the base material here.

For the main wine, even the older reds were still performing that time-defying trick that great Médocs do so well, and the fresh and powerful core of the St-Estèphe appellation, with its clay and limestone subsoils, gives Cos great leeway to go for rich, enticing flavours – particularly, as we have seen, when it is given the freedom to speak for itself.

Cos d’Estournel wines: Every vintage since 2000

Plus two vintages of Pagodes and two of the estate’s white wines, for comparison. 

See Jane Anson’s en primeur tasting notes for Cos d’Estournel 2017 wines