2008 Cos d'Estournel - Super Second by Brilliant Winemaker
2008 Cos d'Estournel - Super Second by Brilliant Winemaker
"The team continues to fine tune and reflect on every possible detail in both the vineyard and the winery in order to achieve even greater success.”
- Robert Parker of Chateau Cos d'Estournel
We love collecting the Famed First Growth Bordeaux wines, but the wine lovers of the world are discovering, collecting and enjoying the Super Second Wines. Château Cos d'Estournel was ranked as a 2nd Growth in the Classification of 1855 and placed as the number one estate of St.-Estephe. It remains one of the most prominent and sought-after wines in all of Bordeaux. "Cos," meaning "hill of pebbles" in Gascon, refers to the deep Quaternary gravel and clay on limestone bedrock that comprises the vineyards of the estate. This characteristic is shared by many of Bordeaux's most prestigious wineries. Located on the border with Pauillac, its vineyards are superbly sited on a south facing gravel ridge with a high clay content, just north of Lafite.
"This property has undergone a complete make-over, building a state-of-the-art, spaceship-looking new winemaking facility, and giving brilliant winemaker Jean-Guillaume Prats carte blanche authority from proprietor Michel Reybier." After reading what Mr. Parker had to say about the winemaking facility, I had to investigate. Wow! As a lover of photography, I am stunned. I cannot wait for the chance to even drive by Chateau Cos d'Estournel. I may not ever get the chance to see inside the cellar, but I can drink what was inside the cellar! Will you join me?
Critical Acclaim:
"The medium to deep garnet colored 2008 Cos d'Estournel is blended of 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, 13% Merlot and 2% Cabernet Franc. Pow! The nose explodes with notes of baked cherries, preserved plums, fried herbs, beef drippings and warm cassis with wafts of wood smoke, salami and tobacco leaf. Medium-bodied, the palate is elegant and earthy/savory in character, sporting beautifully ripe, grainy tannins and bags of freshness, finishing on a lingering mineral note." Lisa Perrotti Brown Nov 2018
Robert Parker 95 Points
Excerpts from Robert Parker's Wine Advocate: Lisa Perrotti-Brown November 2018
Cos d’Estournel stands out as behaving very differently than the other Saint-Estèphe properties. Saint-Estèphe is a little infamous among the four great Médoc communes for producing relatively rugged, euphemistically austere wines—most of the time—and occasionally, inexplicably, it yields legendary wines that need a quarter of a century or more to come around. Saint-Estèphe’s benchmark, I would argue, is Montrose, which demonstrates, with laudable consistency in recent years, the lithe (but not lean) finesse, minerality and rock-solid backbone that the best gravel-over-clay sites, snuggled up to the Gironde estuary, want to give. But the flamboyant, occasionally perfumed, often spicy, decadently textured personality of Cos d’Estournel sets it well apart from this illustrious second growth neighbor to the northeast.
The differences between Cos d’Estournel and other Saint-Estèphe wines is explained at least in part by the fact that it sits on the northern Pauillac border with the long southern extremity of its vaguely rectangular-shaped vineyard overlooking Château Lafite, although the vineyards are in fact separated by a marshy stretch of lower-lying, unplanted land. And while there are some similarities to the character of Lafite—that exquisite, very finely grained, densely pixelated nature of the Cabernet tannins in a great vintage, for example—the differences are greater still.
True Cos fans will know that the word “cos” was derived from the word for “hill of pebbles” in former Gascon dialect. And so, as this name suggests, at the heart of the vineyard is a plateau that levels out at a height of around 63 feet. This plateau is composed of the deep “pebbles” referenced by the name, otherwise known as gravel. Of course, deep gravel forms the basis of nearly all the top vineyards of the Médoc, being the famous soil profile favored by Cabernet Sauvignon.
Thus, Cos d’Estournel joins the growing ranks of great Bordeaux estates exercising more and more precise viticultural management, ultimately achieving heights of quality with greater consistency while expressing, I believe, even more clearly that signature personality of the vineyard through optimal grape ripeness https://www.robertparker.com/articles/w9HvEqJ9N8r83HJgq/france-bordeaux-cos-d-estournel-2000-2015
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