The Good & Great Cognac Houses – Hermitage

At the end of our series on the Good and Great Cognac houses, we thought it appropriate to do a bit of chest beating for our very own Hermitage Cognacs. They are not the products of a single distiller, but from family distilleries and cellars with proven production and ageing procedures.

The concept of Hermitage Pure Vintage Cognacs was formed about fifteen years ago, as we recognised the need to move away from blended cognacs which lacked individuality and failed to promote the age of the cognacs in the bottle. Our customers recognised that older brandies are better than young ones.

The difficulty we recognised is that the distillation of cognac must be to between 67 and 72 degrees alcohol, after which all cognacs take many years to drop naturally to 40%, the commercial selling level of alcohol. The problem was that the commercial pressures to sell in volume was outstripping availability, which put huge pressure on the older stocks available in the thousands of cellars in the region. Those pressures have become far more acute now, with world sales of cognacs at nearly double those of the mid 1990s. which meant that the big houses were creaming off the best vintages for blending.

Although there are many distilleries supplying us, we now have four or five who meet our stringent Hermitage requirements for quality and ageing and adapt their cognacs to meet our customer’s needs.

In those fifteen years of Hermitage, we have created some of the very finest cognacs and we have the gold medals for best vintages to prove it.