Cos d'Estournel
On the heights of Saint-Estèphe stands the majestic pagoda of Cos d’Estournel, the legacy of Louis-Gaspard Lacoste de Maniban, Marquis d’Estournel, the “Maharajah of Saint-Estèphe”. An audacious man, he went all over the world to extol the merits of his wine and win new customers. The estate, founded in 1811 on this gravel slope of Cos, has been shaped over the years by this visionary, and still allows the cultivation of a terroir with remarkable complexity and richness today.
Since 2000, Cos d’Estournel, Second Growth in 1855, has belonged to Mr Michel Reybier. Wishing to follow the founder’s avant-garde vision and take a decisive technical lead, in 2007 he built Bordeaux’s first winery working purely by gravity. This tool helps in the pursuit of excellence on the estate and allows the grapes to be treated with true respect. And so the great terroir of Cos d’Estournel has been further enhanced, illustrated by the Grand Vin Cos d’Estournel and Pagodes de Cos.
Forever passionate about innovation, he introduced numerous technical improvements including the use of glass stoppers and experimented with new grape varieties.
Louis Gaspard d’Estournel was filled with curiosity about and openness to the world around him. His pursuit of new markets led him to Asia, where British officers stationed in India would begin savoring his wine as early as 1838. This proved especially true of his sales practices; rather than depending on Bordeaux’s traditional network of negociants, he chose to personally dispatch his wines to remote places, signing each bottle as a symbol of his emancipation from the system.
Cos d’Estournel is ideally situated at the heart of an undulating landscape in the northern Médoc. The estate’s rolling contours served as inspiration for its name; “cos” is derived from the word for “hill of pebbles” in the old Gascon dialect.
