2024 Château Cos d'Estournel, St-Estèphe

The 2024 Cos d'Estournel was picked from September 23 to October 7 and matured in 50% new oak. This has an atypically powerful bouquet, revealing black fruit laced with graphite and gravelly scents. The palate has a Pauillac-like entry that's fresh but certainly intense. There's plenty of grip in this Cos d'Estournel that's a little sweeter and reassuringly persistent on the finish compared to its peers. It does not deliver the mineralité of a top-flight Cos d'Estournel, though there's certainly much more fruit intensity than you would expect given the growing season. I observed more classicism during my second record, which suggests that the depth of fruit may become more prominent during barrel maturation. Readers should note it displayed more depth and precision on my second visit on the final day in Bordeaux.

The 2024 Cos d'Estournel could very well be one of the wines of the vintage. Bright and vibrant in the glass, with tons of energy, the 2024 impresses with its vertical structure, depth and overall balance. Blue/purplish fruit, spice, new leather, lavender and mocha are beautifully delineated throughout. The 2024 is super-classic. The modest 12.8% alcohol is notable, especially because that also means there is less extraction of wood. Cos is one of my early favorites in 2024.

Highly textural, with layers and depth, this shows savoury and slim black fruits, real finesse, beautifully precise and grippy texture, cocoa bean, espresso, lovely quality. This feels genuinely old school in the best sense of the word. Harvest 23 September to 7 October. 3.52 pH. 20% new oak, 46% 1st wine.

The 2024 Cos d'Estournel is shaping up beautifully. Offering up aromas of sweet cassis, plums, pencil shavings and iris, it's medium to full-bodied, supple and suave, reflecting this estate's pivot to a more harmonious, less aggressively extracted style. With a layered, seamless core of fruit framed by plenty of sweet, powdery tannin, it's a blend of 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 38% Merlot, 1.5% Cabernet Franc and 0.5% Petit Verdot that checks in at 12.7% alcohol. Cos is an early-ripening terroir, and that clearly played to the relative strengths of the vintage. Harvest here began with the estate's old-vine Merlot on gravel on September 23, concluding with the last Cabernet Sauvignon on October 7.