Winemaker Notes
Cos d'Estournel 2025 is harmonious, dense and full of verve, without any excess. Truly magnificent, it offers splendid aromas of fruit, creamy texture and velvety tannins. It is a legendary vintage, one that promises immediate delight early on while also offering great cellaring potential.
Blend: 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 39% Merlot, 1% Cabernet Franc
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Cassis, currants, smoky tobacco, chocolate, and graphite all define the 2025 Château Cos D'Estournel, a powerful, ripe, concentrated beauty based on 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 39% Merlot, and 1% Petit Verdot that's still resting in 50% new barrels. On the palate, it's full-bodied, with a pure, layered mouthfeel, integrated oak, and a great finish. It stays lively, balanced, and remarkably fresh despite its weight and richness, and I'd happily put this up with the crème de la crème of the vintage.
Barrel Sample: 97-99 -
James Suckling
A density to this, yet it remains balanced and complex, with well-integrated tannins and a juicy finish. It seems to be a wine with lots of fruit, but then it diffuses and shows open-grained, velvety tannins. Intense yet subtle blackberries, lead pencil and hazelnuts. Some flint. Persistent and reserved at the end. Great potential. A blend of 60% cabernet sauvignon, 39% merlot and 1% petit verdot.
Barrel Sample: 98-99 -
Vinous
The 2025 Cos d'Estournel is shaping up to be one of the wines of the vintage. Grand, dramatic and sweeping, with notable textural intensity, the 2025 hits all the right notes. Even in the very early going, the 2025 is magical. Dark red/purplish fruit, spice, new leather, tobacco, lavender and mocha build effortlessly in the glass. More than anything else, I am blown away by the wine's magnificent balance. A masterpiece. –Antonio Galloni
Barrel Sample: 96-99 -
Decanter
Vivid pink colour in the glass. Plush, plump and chewy yet serious in a tight, cool blue fruit and graphite way. Lots of gravelly minerality keeps this quite focused and straight but with lovely fine layers of flavour and fruitiness. Classic in the sense of lower alcohol but still with ripe tannins – a nice combination. Still shy I’d say for Cos, definitely not the showy more exuberant style you can find. Refined but well built and definitely not overripe. Dominique Arangoits, technical director of Cos d'Estournel said 2025 was a: ‘Very interesting vintage, the dry situation arrived early so the vines adapted better. Easter brought three days of rain with 115mm on 20 April which proved vital, followed by helpful rain at the end of August. We started harvest on 3 September – our earliest ever. Nice quality of tannins and colour – we have the benefits of a hot season but with cool nights too, low alcohol and nice quantity of fresh fruit. It’s a mix of styles – ripeness and precocity of 2022 and freshness of 2016. Maybe a bit like 2020.’ 3.68pH. 65% grand vin production.
Barrel Sample: 98 -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2025 Cos d'Estournel appears to be one of the finest wines this property has produced in the last decade. Unwinding in the glass with a deep bouquet of dark berry fruit mingled with violets, pencil shavings, burning embers and anise, it's full-bodied, ample and velvety, with a broad attack, layered mid-palate and beautifully fresh, concentrated flavors. All of this terroir's inherent power is present, contained within very classical proportions at 13.3% alcohol. The 2025 is a blend of 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 39% Merlot and 1% Petit Verdot.
Barrel Sample: 96-98
One of the world’s most classic and popular styles of red wine, Bordeaux-inspired blends have spread from their homeland in France to nearly every corner of the New World. Typically based on either Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot and supported by Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot, the best of these are densely hued, fragrant, full of fruit and boast a structure that begs for cellar time. Somm Secret—Blends from Bordeaux are generally earthier compared to those from the New World, which tend to be fruit-dominant.
Deeply colored, concentrated, and distinctive, St. Estephe is the go-to for great, age-worthy and reliable Bordeaux reds. Separated from Pauillac merely by a stream, St. Estephe is the farthest northwest of the highest classed villages of the Haut Medoc and is therefore subject to the most intense maritime influence of the Atlantic.
St. Estephe soils are rich in gravel like all of the best sites of the Haut Medoc but here the formation of gravel over clay creates a cooler atmosphere for its vines compared to those in the villages farther downstream. This results in delayed ripening and wines with higher acidity compared to the other villages.
While they can seem a bit austere when young, St. Estephe reds prove to live very long in the cellar. Traitionally dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon, many producers now add a significant proportion of Merlot to the blend, which will soften any sharp edges of the more tannic, Cabernet.
The St. Estephe village contains two second growths, Chateau Montrose and Cos d’Estournel.