Cognac_directory_FINAL

ecoming increasingly fashionable. The characteristics
of each vintage depend on the weather in the month
before the harvest. Distillers are looking for the right
alcoholic content and above all balance, yet in 1965, a
lousy year when the average strength was a mere 6.76°
Rémy Martin, for instance, made a lovely vintage. At the
other extreme it’s just as bad if the grapes are too ripe.
They were up to 10.94° in 1989 (allegedly too strong,
but the same house offered an excellent single vintage)
and 11° in 1955 (a classic Hine year).
2
THE PERSONALITY
OF COGNAC
Between the distiller and the drinker comes the blender.
Most of the blends will be unremarkable, and most of the
merchants – there are still over two hundred of them –
resemble their eighteenth-century predecessors: they are
largely brokers, intermediaries between the growers and
buyers. Their stocks are largely ‘tactical’, held for a few years,
relying on growers – and wholesalers like the Tesserons – for
most of the older brandies they require. Only a handful are
big enough to hold a balanced stock extending back through
the decades. Nevertheless, like great craftsmen the world
over, the blenders – called chef de caves or maîtres de chai
– have a clear idea in their heads and in the sample of old
bottles in their tasting rooms, rather than on paper, of the
essential qualities historically associated with their name. For
the role of the blender is so key that it became an hereditary
occupation. Until very recently generations of Fillioux were