There aren’t too many brands that can hit the 300 mark and still be at the top of their game. But then again, there aren’t too many brands like renowned Cognac house, Rémy Martin. This holiday season, let’s raise a toast to one of the four original Cognac houses that is celebrating an exceptional 300 years old.
In 1724, an entrepreneurial winemaker in southwestern France with a catchy name — Rémy Martin — began his journey with distilling the now famous spirit. The Cognac region, like Champagne, has become eponymous for its most famous export. At the time, brandy wasn’t particularly new. French brandy production dates to the 1300s and started out, like a lot of other spirits, as something intended for medicinal purposes. In the 1700s, Cognac as a commercial product of its own was relatively new to the scene.
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Cognac is made by twice distilling fermented wine grapes — typically Ugni Blanc, Folle Blanche, and Colombard — in copper pot stills. The distillate, a colorless spirit called eau-de-vie (French for “water of life”), is then put into French oak barrels where it must spend at least four years aging to be labeled V.S.O.P.. Rémy Martin’s award-winning V.S.O.P., the first of its kind when it launched in 1927, is a masterful blend of aged eaux-de-vie.
Whatever young Rémy Martin did worked because a mere 14 years later, in 1738, King Louis XV was such a fan of his brandy that he gave
