Cognac_directory_FINAL

for ten years, out of all the hundreds we taste, 95 per cent
of the best come from the Grande Champagne’. The phrase
Premier Cru de Cognac seen on many a placard throughout
the Grande Champagne is not an official term, merely an
indication that the Grande Champagne really is the finest
area within the Cognac region. But people still matter
for, as one local puts it: ‘the Grande Champagne is in the
inhabitants’ minds and not in the landscape’ – and in the
mind of at least one grower even this small region includes
five different sub-regions!
In theory, as well as in legal status and administrative
practice, Cognac’s crus form a series of concentric circles,
with the Grande Champagne as a rough semi-circle at its
heart, surrounded by a series of rings of steadily decreasing
quality. In geographical reality there are in fact three separate
areas (four including the Borderies), not the six indicated
on the map. To the west there is the coastal plain, with
its vast, ever-changing skies, its marshes, sandy beaches,
oyster beds, off-shore islands – and thin, poor cognacs. The
heterogenous mass of the Bons Bois, which includes patches
of sandy soil especially in the south, is mostly anonymous
rolling countryside which could lie anywhere between the
Loire and the Gironde, the vines mingling with arable and
pasture land.
In its total area – as opposed to the lands under vines
– the Borderies 9 are by far the smallest of all the crus, a
mere 13,440 hectares (52 square miles). The massive and
very heterogenous Fins Bois are nearly thirty times the size,
9 The name derives from the bordes, the metairies, smallholdings
cultivated by sharecroppers who were tenants of the outside investors
in the area in the late sixteenth century.
354,200 hectares (1,367 square miles); the Bon Bois are
even bigger, 386,600 hectares (about 1,500 square miles);
and the Bois Ordinaires are smaller, 274,176 hectares
(1,058 square miles). Historically the Bois were even more
sub-divided, with the Bois Communs below even the Bois
Ordinaires.
But today the legal definition differs from vinous
reality. Vinous practice has followed the advice of Patrick
Daniou, a leading geographer who in 1983 wrote that: ‘it
seems eminently desirable, in order to defend the quality of
cognac’s brandies, to take greater account of terroir in a new
definition of the cognac appellation, which should be based
on scientific criteria and on boundaries that should not
necessarily be administrative ones.’ 10 By 2000 the vineyard
had shrunk from 110,331 hectares in 1976, to a stable
figure of about 80,000 hectares. As a result there has been
a dramatic change in the importance of the different crus
resulting in an automatic improvement in overall quality.
The contrast is extraordinary. In 1976 the Fins Bois,
Bons Bois and Bois Ordinaires accounted for three-fifths of
the total, while in 2011 it was little more than a half. Over
25,000 hectares of vines had been uprooted, including over
half of those in the Bons Bois while the Bois Ordinaires
lost over three-quarters of their 4,300 hectares. This is not
surprising. As a professional tasting guide pointed out in
1973, these brandies ‘are coarse and hard and lack any
distinction’. The remaining vines are virtually all on the
islands of Ré and Oléron, producing cognacs entirely for
the tourist trade. And, as Pierre Szersnovicz of Courvoisier
remarks ‘the salty, iodiney taste of brandies from near the
10 Annales GREH, 1983.