Brandy Education

Legend has it that one cold night Santa, being known as a man of great generosity and feeling great remorse at the duties of his reindeer, plied a quantity of brandy over some rich cake and gave it to his lead reindeer to keep him warm, resulting in a red nose.
The famous Christmas song Rudolph [...]

Grappa was originally a peasant drink, designed to provide comfort and strength to the maker - usually a poor peasant in the mountains of northern Italy. Grappa was more than just a drink - it was a tradition, a disinfectant, a medicine, allegedly sovereign against complaints as diverse as depression in old age, toothache, constipation [...]

Legally the Cognaçais may use a number of grape varieties, although the choice is largely theoretical. The Ugni Blanc or to give it it’s proper name, the St Emillion des Charentes, accounts for about 95% of the total area. The rest is almost totally Colombard and Folle Blanch. This concentration is largely attributable to phylloxera [...]

The house of Massougnes is no more, but in its day was the biggest supplier of cognac in the Charente. The house was famous as well, as it has always been owned by the French Noblesse.
Brandyclassics have recently  acquired the last bottle of cognac from the estate, a 1810 Massougnes Cognac of  c 90cl, which is available [...]

One of the difficulties we always find when deciding upon the flavour of a particular cognac is the time of the day we did the tasting. The problem being that our taste buds have greater efficiency in the mornings than in the afternoon or evenings. Not only that but our perception of what we taste can [...]

Many people often ask us to explain the right way to taste brandies so we thought we would make a new year’s resolution to encourage a wider understanding of cognac appreciation.

Firstly the glass. Big brandy balloons allow too big a surface area of the brandy exposed to the air. The professional glass is a small [...]

During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when Brandyclassics were developing a strategy for selling cognacs, the key question customers would ask was “Can we have a vintage cognac”.
Research has established that more than 93% of customers would prefer to know how old the cognacs they are buying are, rather than rely on a generic [...]

In real terms nobody really knows when cognacs were first put into bottles. The first recorded cognacs existed around 1540, but we only know of them being sold in barrels.
About 200 years later, cognacs were being sold from barrels and transferred into small convenient sized hand blown bottles of around 40-50cl. At around this time [...]

Perhaps the question which comes up most regarding the creation of cognac is that of how it is made. Very little consideration is ever given to the ageing process or indeed the actual barrels used for this most critical part of the process. Indeed the cognac production journey from vineyard to barrel is less than [...]

Reading a cognac label is relatively easy - reading what is not on the label is a little harder! There are labels that will try and give the illusion that what is in the bottle is better than it is. Since the delimitisation of the region and the creation of cru’s, many have tried to provide [...]