Château Cos d’Estournel 2025

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. Drinking window: 2034-2050. (decanter.com)