Cos d'Estournel 2eme Cru Classe, Saint-Estephe 2014

If you want to know what St.-Estèphe smells like, this is it. Aromas of spices, black truffles, forest floor, dried strawberries and tar. It’s full-bodied yet pinpointed on the palate with fabulous density and richness. It’s opulent but in a reserved and checked way. This needs at least five or six years to come around, but it’s already fantastic. What harmony and structure. Try in 2022 if you can keep your hands off it!

Inky depths to this wine, from the first pour you are aware of the exceptional quality, really standing out in this horizontal tasting of the appellation. Inky in colour, heading to soft ruby around the edges, brushed velvet texture, and loaded up with graphite, turmeric, cassis, mint leaf, clove, chocolate and mandarin peel. Impactful and confident, just a shame that the bottle is so heavy. Michel Reybier owner, Aymeric de Gironde director.

The 2014 Cos d’Estournel has another intense bouquet with blackberry, graphite, tobacco and mint aromas, almost Pauillac in style. The palate is medium-bodied with firm tannin that exert plenty of grip. This is surfeit with sappy black fruit, graceful and tensile with a beautiful, svelte finish that fans out gloriously. There is real panache to this wine, persistent and satisfying, the aftertaste of graphite and tobacco extraordinarily long. Tasted blind at the annual Southwold tasting.

The 2014 Cos d'Estournel is rich, powerful and seductive, with notable unctuousness but a medium-bodied frame. Plum, blackberry jam, bittersweet chocolate and lavender notes flesh out in an effortless, sumptuous wine that will provide superb drinking for the next few decades. The 2014 needs time to shed some baby fat, but it is quite impressive, even in the early going. The blend is 65 % Cabernet Sauvignon, 33 % Merlot and 2 % Cabernet Franc.

The grand vin 2014 Cos D’Estournel is gorgeous, and I think a step up over the 2015. A blend of 65% Cabernet Sauvignon, 33% Merlot and 2% Cabernet Franc, this deep, inky-colored 2014 boasts a gorgeous perfume of ripe currants and cassis fruits, loads of chocolaty oak, cedar and scorched earth, full-bodied richness, and building, firm, yet ripe tannin. It’s certainly one of the gems in the vintage, as well as one of the more structured, opulent and age-worthy. Give bottles 4-5 years of bottle age and enjoy over the following two to three decades.

A blend of 65% Cabernet Sauvignon, 33% Merlot and 2% Cabernet Franc, the 2014 Cos d'Estournel has a deep garnet-purple color and is a little closed at this stage, offering slowly emerging scents of fresh blackcurrants, black plums and blackberries plus nuances of pencil shavings, dried lavender, bay leaves and fertile loam with a waft of iron ore. Medium to full-bodied, it has a generous mid-palate of muscular, youthful fruit with a firm frame of grainy tannins and seamless freshness, finishing long and savory.