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The Land and The Vines Part 1 – Terroir

Posted / in The Land and The Vines and tagged

The French have a word, ‘terroir’ which cannot be directly translated into another language but refers to the land, the weather, the climate and just about anything which affects the quality of the vine and the conditions in which it grows. In the Charente the ‘terroir’ is very special, in theory the component parts could be reproduced anywhere but here the result is unique.  According to Professor Louis Ravaz (who did a great deal to help replant cognac vineyards after the Phylloxera disaster),

“The same variety of grape can be grown anywhere and in the same way as in the Charente, distillation can be carried out as at Cognac and in the same stills, the brandy can be stored in identical casks as those we employ in our region; it can be cared for as well or maybe even better. But the same combination of weather and terrain cannot be found anywhere else. As far as the soil is concerned, it is not enough that it should belong to the same geological formations, it must have the same physical and chemical composition and no one has ever found such a duplicate. In addition, the climate of the region must be identical to the climate of the Charente and that is almost inconceivable. There is therefore very little chance that all the elements that influence the nature of the product should be found together in any other region apart from the Charente and thus no other region can produce cognac. The slightest difference in the climate, the soil and so on is enough to change completely the nature of the brandy, and that is as it should be because there are, even in the Charente , a few spots (small ones, it is true), which produce mediocre brandy. All the trials that have been made all over the place to produce cognac with the same varieties and the Charentais method have resulted only in failure. And this lack of success could have been foreseen if people had remembered this one principle, that the nature of products is dependent on a combination of conditions which occurs only rarely.”

So it is that we consider the extraordinary terroir in the Charente, the only region in the world that is responsible for making cognac, the King of all spirits.

Read more about the cognac industry on our Information Pages.