This brown spirit may be the best bargain in the drinks world right now says Henry Jeffreys, a former whisky retailer who's watched whisky prices rise over his 14-year writing career. Above, cognac barrels and bonbonnes (credit: Hermitage Cognac).
With his tweed jacket and sizeable frame David Baker looks like he could have stepped out of Jancis Robinson’s Vintners Tales (available on YouTube for anyone curious what the wine world was like until surprisingly recently). Baker’s job is finding and bottling rare cognac, mainly from Grand Champagne, the most prestigious vineyards in the Cognac region, which he bottles under the Hermitage brand. He’s been doing it since 1987 and his unrivalled contacts in the region means he’s able to unearth some miraculous liquids.
I’ve been lucky enough to have lunch with Baker – he’s a keen luncher – on three occasions. Most memorably in 2020 at The Draper’s Arms in Islington during a break from all those lockdowns. After we had eaten, Baker poured me a tiny measure of a deep brown liquid. As he smelled it, a look of almost religious wonder came across his face and in his soft Sussex accent he began to rhapsodise. It was a Grand Champagne from 1885 which had spent 100 years in wood and was then decanted into a glass demijohn. Apparently it was showing its age when Baker first tried it, but a further 10 years in a newish cask rejuvenated this ancient liquid. Baker described it as ‘beyond the quality of anything we have come across before’.
I had a little sniff and my senses were assaulted with heady aromas of furniture polish followed by overripe pineapples, apricots, dark chocolate and tobacco. Baker describes it as ‘double rancio’. Rancio refers to rich flavours of walnut, pineapple and dried apricot produced over time during the interaction between the cask, alcohol and oxygen which you find in old cognac, tawny port and malt whisky. What was remarkable about the flavour was the sheer freshness of it after more than a century in oak.
Now, understandably, this was extremely expensive – over £4,000 a bottle. But Baker stocks more affordable stuff like a 1990 Grand Champagne which costs £150. That’s a 30-year-old vintage-dated single cask spirit of which there are fewer than 250 bottles in existence for less than a bottle of Talisker 18 Year Old single-malt whisky. Incidentally, a 30 Year Old Talisker will cost you around £1,000.
In 14 years writing about spirits and six years working for whisky retailer Master of Malt, I’ve watched the price of the most in-demand Scotch whisky go up and up, and then up some more. When you compare the price of single-malt whisky with cognac, even that 1885 Hermitage looks like good value. I’ve never seen a whisky as old but the comparatively sprightly Macallan 50 Year Old is currently on sale at The Whisky Exchange for more than 10 times the price of the Hermitage 1885 – £55,000. I’ve tasted a lot of very old whisky and they’re often dusty and a bit faded, more curiosities than anything else.
When I met Baker again recently, over lunch, naturally, at Hide in Piccadilly, he explained that the best Grand Champagne cognac can easily age to 70 years or more (though he admits that he had on three occasions left some brandy in a cask for too long and ended up with something that tasted of ‘water with an old pair of boots in’). To prove his point we started with his 50 Year Old Grand Champagne (£600), ‘to get your taste buds going’, and worked up from there to the 100 Year Old Siècle d’Or.
Baker thinks the reason such rarities are affordable compared with whisky is that they lack brand recognition: ‘nobody knows anything about them’. He buys from growers who usually supply the big four négociant houses: Martell, Hennessy, Courvoisier and Rémy Martin. These little producers keep particularly fine casks for family use which they sometimes sell when they need some money.
Baker visibly winced when he told me about a batch of pre-World War One cognac he missed out on which ended up going into the blending vats of one of the big four. Don’t get him started on the large houses who dominate the industry: ‘the everyday stuff is rubbish – they put 500 cognacs in a blend. All they are creating is neutrality.’
There are other cognac producers doing interesting things in the region today, too. Take Delamain, for example. This house, which celebrates its 200 anniversary this year, has long been a favourite of the British wine trade. In 2017 Bollinger took a majority stake in the business, which has led to some changes including a return to cultivating vines for the first time since 1910 with 20 hectares (49 acres) of prime vineyard in Grand Champagne called Bellevigne. The classic XO Pale & Dry was reformulated and is now bottled at a higher strength, 42%, with no colouring or syrup added. Then in 2020 Delamain released a series of rare cognacs called Pléiade, including a 1965 bottling.
The pick of the bunch for me, however, was the Collection Plénitude 1980, which comes from a single barrel matured in a special cellar that was once a crypt, selected by Dominique Touteau who has been cellarmaster for 42 years. What struck me tasting this was the pure fruitiness with flavours of peaches, oranges and a little cherry pit combined with a big menthol freshness. This is expensive at around £600 but again compare it with what you’d pay for a 40 Year Old single-malt Scotch. As for Japanese whisky, you’ll need to remortgage your house.
While most producers in Cognac act as négociants, buying in wine or eaux-de-vie that they then turn into cognac, there are also firms such as Hine which have extensive vineyard holdings. This allows Hine to release single-vineyard spirits such as the elegant, floral Hine Single Estate Bonneuil 2012. There’s a lot of waffle about terroir in the whisky world, most of it nonsense, yet here is a brandy that shows off the chalky soils of Grand Champagne. It’s a brandy for lovers of grower champagne.
Cognac is in a funny position in that it has a prestige image – and indeed you can pay a lot of money for lavishly packaged bottles that are drunk by oligarchs and rap stars – but the quality stuff without the bling isn’t silly money. In my time as editor of the Master of Malt blog, I’d try to persuade customers to make the move to cognac (or Armagnac, definitely one for another day) but most stuck to what they knew. Well, their loss is your gain. It might sound counter-intuitive but cognac is currently one of the bargains of the drink world.
Kent-based Henry Jeffreys writes about wine and spirits on his Drinking Culture Substack and is the author of four books including Empire of Booze: British history through the bottom of a glass and Vines in a Cold Climate: The people behind the English wine revolution.