Producers: Château Cos d'Estournel

The Château Cos d'Estournel is one of the most famous wineries in Bordeaux. Since the classification of 1855, the winery is classified as "Deuxième Grand Cru Classé", in the second highest of the classification of 1855. 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 property Château Cos Labory. Due to the sandy, pebbly soil, enough moisture is stored even in summer. In winter, however, the slope and the profound nature of the subsoil (created in the Eocene) ensures that no water accumulates. 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's goal was to produce the best wine in the world, in the vicinity of the highly respected Château Lafite-Rothschild estate in Pauillac, on the other side of the small moat Jalle de Breuil. For this he bought the gravel heights north of Lafite and began an extensive construction activity. In his trading activities, he found that the unsold wine returned from India was better than the same wine remaining in the château. This led him to send all his wines on a voyage before selling, as he preferred the quality improvement over the cost increase. The wines of those years he marked with an "R": Retour des Indes, back from India, as a quality feature. They were initially torn from his hands. These costly measures of construction and shipping, however, ruined him in the medium term; he had to sell his estate in 1852 to his almost equally wine crazed London banker Martyns. Estournel remained single and childless. He died a year later as a poor man at the age of 91, shortly before his life's work gained international recognition in 1855 as "Deuxieme Grand Cru". The large dredge 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-winged door, allegedly from the harem area of ??the Sultan's palace in Zanzibar, which was bought in the trade against wine.