Boozehound - Jason Wilson [93]
I asked the distillers at Ragnaud-Sabourin and Jean Fillioux how they felt about the new focus on cocktails. Is it a good thing? “We’re not interested in knowing whether it’s a good thing or not,” Dagnaud said.
When I posed the same question to master distiller Pascal Fillioux, he said simply, “I am not a mixologist. I like to drink cognac.”
Other people I met in Cognac expressed unease. “I’m concerned about the future of cognac,” said Véronique Reboul, who with her husband, Alain, grows wine grapes for several large cognac producers. We sat in their courtyard one afternoon, sipped Pineau de Charentes, the local aperitif. The Rebouls were big fans of Texas, having visited fledgling winemakers there in Cognac’s sister city, Denison. There was a Citroën parked in the courtyard with a “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker. “The younger generation is more interested in vodka. They perceive cognac to be Granddad’s alcohol,” said Véronique. “They perceive it to be expensive.” Throughout France, throughout the world, I’d of course heard the same theme.
Back in the mid-2000s, before governments had more important things to worry about, a vodka war raged within the European Union. The so-called Vodka Belt countries of central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia declared that the spirit could be made only from grain or potatoes. A Finnish-backed proposal in the European Parliament sought to block distillers in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France from calling their spirits “vodka” if they used nontraditional ingredients, such as fruit. The stakes were not small. Vodka, after all, is a twelve-billion-dollar worldwide industry.
In the end, the upstart nations prevailed, and they continue to sell their spirits as vodka. “Vodka War Lost,” read the headline in the Warsaw Voice. “Would the French like champagne to be distilled from plums, and would the British accept whisky from apricots?” scoffed one Polish parliamentarian, who vowed to fight on.
Normally, stuff like disrespecting terroir gets blamed on Americans. So it was a small relief—a pleasure, really—to see the French get dragged into the fray. As they should have been. Some of the biggest names in the vodka business—Grey Goose, Cîroc, Citadelle—are produced around the legendary French distilling town of Cognac. To be fair, Grey Goose (created in 1997 specifically by Sidney Frank for the American market) and Citadelle are made with a traditional ingredient, wheat. But Cîroc and others use grapes in the distilling process. One can only imagine what sort of war France might wage if someone started bottling and selling a “cognac” from, say, West Virginia (perhaps made from ramps).
Of course, with the wild success of Grey Goose, many others have tried to capture the Cognac vodka magic. In early 2010, Sam’s Club introduced a new vodka called Rue 33. According to Sam’s Club, this vodka is “ultra premium” and “six times distilled and three times filtered.” It is made in Cognac, France, just like Grey Goose, but true to Sam Club’s form, this six-time distilled, ultra-premium vodka will be sold, economy-sized, in 1.75-liter bottles. Now, no matter how much eye-rolling goes on about romantic stories of elderflowers or monks or deer’s blood, they’re all a hell of lot better than, say, a boardroom-driven tale that goes, “Let’s create some booze we can sell two aisles over from the diapers and the kitty litter, in 1.75-liter containers, at the seemingly affordable yet actually ridiculous price point of twenty-eight dollars.”
But vodka is only the tip of the iceberg in Cognac. On one of my trips, I visited EuroWineGate, which