Tasting the 2015 Cos d’Estournel
A play in fourteen acts
Cos d’Estournel Saint-Estèphe 2015
Day 1
Black cherry color, medium density, faintly tawny at the rim. Perfumed, graphite, blue fruits, tobacco. Warm and approachable, welcoming, smiling. The texture is silky at first, then shimmery, then the tannins grip like a fine-toothed comb. Mouth-filling, the flavors are dark-fruited, savory, leather-soy-umami. It is muscular. It is mature, self-assured, calm. It knows itself.
One
Since January I’ve been weight training, transforming my 59-year-old self into a 60-year-old self that is stronger, more capable. Working. I’ve gained six pounds of muscle. Old but muscular, ready, calm. Not perfect; good. Or better.
Two
So much happening in this wine. A wine that makes me think things and feel things. Starts strong, stays interesting, challenges me. It’s challenging, friendly at first but soon the conversation darkens as it shares hard truths. But there’s also levity, circumspection, a sense that regardless of the weight of the world, we can sort it.
Three
Good wine isn’t easy, good wine challenges. Most wines don’t challenge me, don’t ask questions. It’s not a test, just a conversation. Black raspberry now, leaf and flower, a surprise in the thicket of more important flavors, like a joke tossed casually into a story about death. Living is the flip side of mortality. Keep it light, don’t get bogged down. I was on the phone with a childhood friend who’s moving her dad into a care facility after her mom died suddenly. It’s good for dad and good for her but bad for brother left behind. Light and dark together.
Four
Why has death arrived here? Perhaps good wine urges us to confront it, viz., to consider what matters. A colleague recounted tasting a birth year wine, filling pages of his notebook while other colleagues looked on, bemused. This isn’t a tasting note, he told them. It’s my dialogue with death.
Five
Even more perfumed now, rose petals, in fact beach rose, wildly aromatic with papery pink flowers but vicious thorns, impenetrable, thorns that keep everyone away from the beach house permanently and forever: touch me, don’t touch me. Now I get mint, even wintergreen. That’s new.
Six
How fortunate I am to drink a wine like this.
Seven
Now it’s darkening again, the mint and rose and raspberry leaf drifting off and the building blocks clicking together at the back of my tongue.
Eight
I’m roasting a chicken. The fat has splattered the walls of my new oven and as I open the door a cloud of schmaltzy, smoky Maillard steam fills the kitchen. Now there’s blueberry, like the wine suddenly got simpler, told an off joke. We all do that sometimes. So it’s human after all.
Nine
I tent the chicken with parchment, resolve to clean the oven when it’s cold. I pull the cork on another wine, a fancy Napa Cab, the best of an active project to taste a slew. This is sport on my part. I want to follow the discussion between these two guests from California and Bordeaux. They struggle to strike up a conversation.
Ten
Finally, the meal. The complexity.
Day 2
I had it in the fridge overnight. One glass left. The aromas are consistent: tobacco, coffee, brambly fruit, more brambly than yesterday, leather, vanilla, spice, old paneled room with Turkish carpet worn thin with use, sunlight on the mahogany shutters and silk brocade, the manor house at dusk. Maybe lavender. And what is this? Frankincense, fenugreek, turmeric, what is it in the middle? All of the things in the golden box the three kings took to the manger, not that it did the infant any good. The wine has more levity today, refreshed by sleep, ready to tell another joke, a better one, or try to. I’m fresher too, my palate no longer numbed by tannin and alcohol, the weight of the meal. It’s juicy at the finish, as if I’d bitten a lime.
Eleven
Incandescent, lit up, levitating. I recall a pow wow at Dartmouth watching the fancy dance competition, the professional dancers who compete all summer on the circuit. There was one man, lean, lithe, serious, eyes not quite on sky, not quite on earth, liminal. He circled the ring as if he were floating, occasionally touching one foot down, then the other, not because he had to, because he wanted to. Like that.
Twelve
The tobacco starts to feel distracting. The fruit moves in, ushers it to the side, sits down, keeps the conversation going.
Thirteen
Getting to the end. No real sediment, just a few grains of black tartrate. It is holding firm, and after a few sips I can feel the tannins rebuilding walls across my palate. The walls of the crumbling old city that keep bad things out, good things in. That tell me where the boundaries lie.
Fourteen
Maybe in twenty years, thirty years, the wine will wither. At that point the only remedy will be to drink it. Me, I keep working.
Cos d’Estournel Saint-Estèphe 2015: 75% Cabernet Sauvignon, 23.5% Merlot, 1.5% Cabernet Franc; 13.5% ABV. Available for about $225 at various retailers and currently offered in a limited-edition, three-bottle gift box for $735 from Millesima and select wine shops. This bottle was a sample for review.
“Cos,” digital painting ©2025 Meg Maker
You’re the second person in a week who has used fenugreek in discussing wine. The other person used it to describe a wine that was notably reductive. First time I had ever heard that comparison. For me Fenugreek is a more bass herbal note. It’s green but not piercing, laying a foundation of herbs.
It’s also refreshing to read your commentary on the wine in juxtaposition of so many in the internet wine geek community who actively loathe 2015 Cos (not to mention other vintages) because it’s not the same Cos from 1982. As if we’re the same people we were 33 years earlier.