Did You Know? Brandy and St Bernard Alpine Rescue Dogs
There are 135 official mountain rescue dogs in the Swiss canton of Valais. The St Bernard story began in the year 962 when Bernard of ...
How to make Armagnac – Serving and enjoying
Right from the 15th century, the English Kings have come and gone from the armagnac producing region we know as Gascony. The is near perfect ...
How to make Armagnac – The changing ages
Armagnacs, as we have discovered earlier, are distilled at a lower range than the cognacs made a couple of hundred miles to the north, and ...
How to make Armagnac – The stills and maturation
The armagnac still in its most used current form is a relatively recent invention, first perfected by a local peasant known as Verdier, who gave ...
How to make Armagnac – The distillation method
The wines of armagnac are fairly basic, in itself no bad thing. The traditional winemakers eschew the use of sugar, sulphur dioxide and other additives, ...
How to make Armagnac – An individual spirit
The Armagnaçaise have two advantages over their rivals; the Cognaçaise operate on such a large scale that they do not generally offer brandies from individual ...
The history of Armagnac – Late 20th Century
The dominance of cognac in the French spirit markets has created over the years a market inferiority complex, perhaps partly because the region has always ...
The history of Armagnac – 20th Century Growth
Phylloxera was no less kind to the Armagnaçaise than to those in the rest of France and although a few growers managed to continue producing ...
The history of Armagnac – 19th Century Modernisation
Two important changes happened in the 19th century that changed the fortunes of the Armagnaçaise for the better. The first was the introduction of the ...
The history of Armagnac – 16th, 17th and 18th Century
During the 16th century, a spirit distilled from a wine in Toulouse known as aygue ardente or eau de vie became popular with the Dutch ...
