KEY POINTS:
A decade is just a drop in the barrel of the four centuries which have distilled the rich and surprising history of cognac.
All the same, some decades, like some cognacs, are more momentous than others.
In 1998, the small town of Cognac in south-western France was, literally,
under siege. Angry vineyard owners blocked all approach roads with piles of burning tyres.
A brandy surplus equivalent to two years' global sales - a cognac sea, rather than a lake - was piled in and around the town. The big cognac companies - Hennessy, Martell, Remy Martin and Courvoisier - had suspended their purchases of eau-de-vie, or "raw" young brandy.
Cognac, arguably one of France's greatest gifts to humanity, had lost ground in its homeland to a fashionable taste for whisky. Some important foreign markets had collapsed. Growers were being paid to rip out their vines.
Ten years later, cognac is no longer on the rocks. Sales of the world's favourite brandy smashed all records last year. More than 158 million bottles were sold in 2007, nine out 10 of them outside France and more than one in three in America. This was the sixth successive year in which the world's thirst for cognac has grown.
The abrupt change in fortunes is explained by a cocktail of global trends, some predictable, some surprising. They range from the emergence of a vast, cognac-quaffing, Chinese middle class to the establishment of cognac as one of the principal icons of American rap music. Last year, two symbols of quality and conspicuous consumption jostled with sex and guns as the principal subject for US rap lyrics and titles. Cadillacs came first. Cognac came a close second.
In the small town of Cognac, and the large brandy-producing region which surrounds it, burning tyres and angry placards are now just a memory. Small wine-producers in much of the rest of France bemoan global competition and a worldwide glut of cheap wine.
Cognac producers are, cautiously, celebrating the arrival of a global economy (and praying that the US and Asia are not heading for a recession). Patrice Brisset, 49, is a cognac producer in the pretty village of Saint Preuil, just east of Cognac. His family has been growing grapes for brandy-making for 340 years.
"The cognac crisis in 1998 was a false crisis, a pseudo-crisis," he said. "Nature is bountiful, especially the vine, but mankind is not always reasonable. When times were good in the 1990s, we simply produced too many grapes and too much cognac.
"But the crisis was never going to last. Anyone with a little common sense could have seen that cognac was perfectly placed to benefit from the globalised world which was just beginning. Until a few years ago, cognac had more name recognition in China than Coca-Cola."
Here is another surprise. Cognac, symbol par excellence of French savoir faire and art de vivre, was one of the first "global" products.
It was invented in the early 1600s by the Dutch, based on methods of wine distillation borrowed from the Middle East, by way of north Africa. It was refined by the French and commercially developed by the Irish and British. Cognac is mostly made from ugni blanc grapes. They produce an acidic, low-alcohol white wine which is undrinkable, but perfect for distillation.
Cognac exports to China increased by 73 per cent last year. If you include sales shipped through Singapore, China has now overtaken Britain as the second largest consumer of cognac, after the US.
The unlikely connection between cognac and rap music is more recent.
In 2002, Busta Rhymes reached the top five of the rap charts in America with a song called Pass the Courvoisier. Six years later rap lyrics are still littered with references to "yak" - slang for Cognac - and Henny - slang for Hennessy.
Mixed with everything from Coca-Cola, to beer, to pineapple juice, or swigged straight from the delicately crafted bottle, cognac has become the drink of choice for rap performers and their fans.
Courvoisier reported a 50 per cent jump in its American sales after Busta Rhymes took the name of the label to the top of the US charts.
- Independent
