Boozehound - Jason Wilson [92]
While I was visiting Groult, Jean-Roger’s sister, Estelle, stopped by the tasting room with an apple pie she had just baked. I ate the pie, and I sipped Groult’s lovely thirty-plus-year-old Doyen d’Age. From the tasting room, we could see apples ripening, ready to fall from the trees. The wood fire burned in the distillery room. The Calvados was aging quietly in the dark rooms as it had for decades. That moment represented everything I love and admire about fine spirits.
So many of the things people value are hard to define. In the fall of 2008, I attended the famed white truffle festival in Alba, Italy. For several days, a friend and I ate truffle shaved on more things than seemed reasonable or necessary (one €35 dish was simply truffle shaved on a baked egg), wandered among the truffle hunters in a very pungent convention center, and debated endlessly how to describe the white-truffle experience. We tossed around the usual descriptors: earthy, woody, rooty, garlicky, foresty. We chuckled about the unfortunate comparison once used by food writer Corby Kummer in Gourmet magazine to describe his first taste of truffle as a youth: “It tasted of parts of the body I urgently wanted to know better.” But in the end, we agreed that part of the fungus’s allure was that it defied description.
That’s why, the first time I visited Cognac, I was happy to discover the concept of rancio. Rancio is the term for a peculiar flavor that the finest cognac takes on as it ages. It is, of course, impossible to describe. Nutty? Mushroomy? Cheesy? Gary Regan, author of the classic The Joy of Mixology, calls rancio “lactic” and likens it to the flavor of soy sauce; I do not disagree, though there also might be hints of toffee or almond. Beyond flavor, rancio also connotes a certain mouthfeel—the way the cognac presents on the tongue and finishes with an almost walnutlike oiliness.
Even for cognac producers, rancio is hard to describe. “It’s a special taste,” said Pascal Dagnaud, the master distiller at the small but highly regarded Ragnaud-Sabourin. “It’s close to caramel, but a little bitter. It tastes a little like a bitter nut. It’s a special taste.”
At Ragnaud-Sabourin and Jean Fillioux, rancio was present in several offerings I tasted, as were dried fruit, spices, and dark chocolate. Rancio was most pronounced in Jean Fillioux’s Cigar Club—and indeed in its Rèserve Familiale—and in Ragnaud-Sabourin’s forty-five-year-old Florilège and Le Paradis, the last a blend of mostly century-old cognac with a small percentage of eau-de-vie that predated the mid-nineteenth-century phylloxera blight that destroyed so many European vineyards. These cognacs were as close to perfection as a distilled spirit could be.
One doesn’t have to go to France to experience rancio, but sadly, in the States there are impediments. Cognac remains a mystery here for a few reasons. First, the really good stuff can be prohibitively priced. Case in point: Le Paradis will set you back about, oh, seven hundred dollars or so. Most of the cognac sold in the United States is either VS or VSOP. In very few cases do cognacs in those categories exhibit the elusive rancio, which generally appears after a decade or more of aging (and which, to me, is what separates a cognac you’d sip from one you’d mix in a cocktail). That is perhaps why boutique producers often do not make a VSOP. If you want to taste a bit of rancio on the cheap, something like Martell Medaillon VSOP or Hine Rare VSOP (both about forty dollars) are good. Otherwise, it might pay to invest eighty dollars or more in a bottle of XO. It’s expensive, but it should last you a long time.
My first visit to Cognac came during strange, jittery times: just as recession was setting in. The “big four” cognac producers—Courvoisier, Hennessy, Martell, and Rémy Martin—had been riding high in recent years, with sales growing about 37 percent between 2001 and 2007. Cognac’s popularity within youthful hip-hop culture generally