Rapper's delight

Thursday, 19th November 2009

Thanks to a few hip-hop megastars, brandy is enjoying something of a renaissance. Peter Grogan reports

Brandy seems to travel these days with a certain amount of baggage. Any exercise in word-association involving the name ‘cognac’ is likely to reference quite an acreage of oak panelling, some wing-back leather armchairs, at least a couple of bristling moustaches and – who knows? – maybe even a cravat.

So it is with some relish that I have been conjuring for myself a monocle-popping, H.M. Bateman-esque scene in which The Man Who... is the rap mega-star (or, according to his country’s president, ‘jackass’) Kanye West and he is strolling through the library of White’s Club swigging from a bottle of Hennessy (a.k.a. ‘Henn-dawg’) in much the same manner as he did before invading the stage at this year’s MTV awards to inform an ingénue winner that he didn’t think she deserved her gong.

Brandy has always been a broad church though, not least in terms of the drinks defined by the word itself. The congregation includes not just the familiar version distilled from wine but also the marc and grappa made from the skins, seeds and what-have-you left over from the wine making process itself, as well as all those eaux-de-vie-de-this-and-that which are made from fruits other than the grape. Putting aside these distractions (and the fact that Spain is the largest producer of grape brandies) it’s cognac and armagnac, not necked from the bottle but served in a ballon glass bigger than Busta Rhymes’s baseball cap, that we’re interested in here.

Most brandy drinkers seem to have a preference for either cognac or armagnac so it would be useful to summarise the differences. Geographically, all is simple enough; the Cognac region is to the north of Bordeaux in Charentes while Armagnac is to the south, in Gascony. Different methods of distillation are used, cognac traditionally being twice distilled in a pot still (called a pot Charentais thereabouts) while ‘armers’ is now generally made by single distillation in a continuous (or ‘column’) still. (It being traditionally more of a ‘farmhouse’ product, the various contraptions and portable stills from which armagnac was for centuries made sadly fell foul of reforming zeal in a law of 1970). In terms of quantity cognac is the daddy, making almost 20 times as much while armagnac gets the nod on history as it was first made 200 years earlier.

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