Château Cos d'Estournel

Facade of the barrel store

The Chateau Cos d'Estournel is one of the most famous wineries of Bordeaux . Since the classification of 1855 , the winery has been classified as "Deuxième Grand Cru Classé ", in the second highest of the 1855 classification.

location

The estate is located in Saint-Estèphe in the south, directly on the municipal boundary to Pauillac on the first hill and opposite the sister estate Château Cos Labory , on the "Route du Vin", the D2 departmental road .

The sandy, pebble-resistant soil stores enough moisture even in summer. In winter, however, the hillside location and the deep nature of the subsoil (created in the Eocene) ensure that no water accumulates.

The vineyard area is 64 ha; it is planted 60% with Cabernet Sauvignon , 38% with Merlot and 2% with Cabernet Franc . The winery produces around 370,000 bottles of wine in normal years .

Wines

Among the best incurred in Château wines are so far the vintages 1990 and 1995. These wines from the internationally recognized wine critic is Robert Parker with 95 Parker Points (PP) counted ; the 1982 wine received 96 PP. A bottle from these vintages can rarely be bought for less than 150 euros (as of 2005). The wines from the 2003 and 2005 vintages each received 98 Parker points.

Cos d'Estournel is known throughout France and is valued by wine connoisseurs.

The second wine of the estate is called Les Pagodes de Cos .

Château Cos d'Estournel is currently accompanied and advised by the oenologist Jacques Boissenot and his son Eric .

history

The estate was founded in the 19th century by the wine merchant Louis-Gaspard Estournel , whose specialty was the horse trade from Arabia and the wine trade to Arabia and India, so to speak, in shuttle traffic. Estournel set himself the goal of producing the best wine on earth in the vicinity of the highly regarded Château Lafite-Rothschild estate in Pauillac , on the other side of the small Jalle de Breuil ditch . To do this, he bought the gravel heights north above Lafite and began extensive building activity.

In his trading activities, he found that the unsold wine returned from India was better than the same wine that remained in the château. This prompted him to ship all of his wines before they were sold as he preferred improving quality to increasing costs. He marked the wines of those years with an "R": Retour des Indes , back from India, as a sign of quality. At first they were literally torn from his hands.

These complex measures of building and shipping ruined him in the medium term; he had to sell his estate in 1852 to his almost equally wine-mad London banker Martyns . Estournel remained single and childless. He died a year later at the age of 91 as a poor man, shortly before his life's work achieved international recognition in 1855 when it was classified as a “ Deuxieme Grand Cru ”.

The large barrel storage cellar was built by Estournel in the style of a Chinese pagoda with several curved roofs. The gable side is adorned with an impressively carved dark double wing door, which supposedly comes from the harem area of the Sultan's Palace of Zanzibar and was bought in trade for wine.

The bankers Martyns sold the estate to the Basque Errazu family in 1869 , who in turn sold it to the brothers Jean-Justin and Jean-Jules Hostein in 1889 . They also owned Château Montrose until 1896 . In 1917 Fernand Ginestet , a well-known wine merchant in Bordeaux and also long co-owner of Château Margaux , bought the Cos estate . His grandchildren Yves , Jean-Marie and Bruno Prats inherited the estate in 1970. Bruno Prats became a managing partner and held this position until 1998 when the family sold the estate to the Taillan Group . Prats was able to install his son Jean-Guillaume as an employed general manager during the sale . After a brief episode in the Taillan group , the estate was sold to the Reybier wine group in 2000 .

In July 2008 it was announced that Michel Reybier had taken over the Californian Chateau Montelena Winery from Jim and Bo Barret . The parties agreed not to disclose the purchase price. Since the 2008 vintage, Bo Barrett , Greg Ralston , the cellar master of Cos d'Estournel Dominique Arangoits , and Jean-Guillaume Prats , managing director of Cos d'Estournel , have been running the day-to-day business .