Only le bonne chauffe
Cognac is a spirit derived from the distillation of wine, that is processed twice through a still called "charentais". The first step is putting the wine into a boiler: by heating, the alcohol separates from the water and evaporates into a second onion dome shaped cowl. Once there, it evaporates a second time and goes into a thin serpentine in which it slowly condense. During this second process, the distiller performs a delicate operation called "coupe" which consists in separating the first-arrived vapours (the "heads"), the best part of the alcohol (the "heart") and the tails (the "seconds"). The heads and the seconds are put aside for different reasons - the first are too high in alcohol, the second lack harmony - and then reintroduced to the wine for another distillation. Only the heart, with its 72% of alcoholic clearness, becomes cognac, and it is also called "bonne chauffe".
The alembic used to distillate the wine has Arabic origins, and it was probably introduced in France during the crusades. Many legends surround the eau-de-vie, but probably the best known is the one concerning the invention of the double distillation. It tells about the XVI century's knight Jacques de la Croix-Maron, who had a nightmare one night: he dreamt of Satan trying to take his soul by boiling it; as soon as the Devil did not succeed, he kept threatening the knight to re-boil him. De la Croix suddenly awoke and had the intuition that the dream meant something more than it seemed. He thought that he had to boil the wine twice in order to extract its real soul!

Double distillation itself is a peculiar way to produce a spirit, but it is not enough to let this spirit be called cognac: then comes ageing. Cognac maturing is a slow and accurate process. After the distillation, the bonne chauffe is put into large oak barrels made with soft, finely grained wood from the Limousin and the Tronçais forests. The quality of the wood is very important because its inner humidity is the element that makes the cognac age: the process of ageing, in fact, ends when the spirit is put into glass bottles and there remains immutable. Cognac, passing the years, loses progressively its alcohol content and its volume, while taking wood's unique tannin, boisé and taste. In order to be sold, it loses at least 60% of its original volume via evaporation. The majority could think this is a wasted quota, but French people found a more poetic way to define it: "the Angels' share" averages around twenty-five million bottles per year, making the angels flying over the town probably the happiest in the world!

Elaboration is the next step, a very delicate operation as well. The bottling of the cognac is not simply the transferring of it from the casks to the bottles. The cognac we drink is always the blending of several eaux-de-vie of different ages and "crus" - the six geographical areas in which the production territory is divided - supervised by the "cellar master", the magician behind the definition of each cognac's unique taste. With a great deal of expertise, combined with intuition and method, the cellar master holds the key to the non-written secret of blending and transmits his know-how from generation to generation. The cellar master decides also when is time to send the casks to the elaboration. The oldest Cognacs are kept in a dark cellar, usually away from the other cellars and known as 'the Paradise'. Once they have reached maturity, the cellar master decides to stop the ageing process and puts them first into very old oak casks, then into glass demi-johns, in which they can stay for many years without further development, no longer in contact with the air.




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