The Cognac Process: Part 1.2 – In the Beginning
In the latter half of the 17th Century the fashion conscious world of Restoration London, like so many others before and since, lived largely in public. The “café” society congregating in the capital’s coffee houses experimented with a whole host of new drinks.
Some, like tea, coffee and chocolate were non-alcoholic. Most were wines; claret, port, sherry, more or less fortified to withstand the journey to Britain (and to accord with the English taste for robust liquors). Only one, from Cognac, a small town in Western France was a spirit.
Since then cognac has never looked back. From newspaper advertisements at the turn of the 18th Century, we can measure by the “conìac” prices at which they were offered, that brandies from Cognac were worth more than 10% than those from Nantes or Bordeaux. The reasons for cognac’s dominance, then as now were geological, geographical and historic.
Even today, it is a relatively small town on the Charente of some 20,000 inhabitants. In the 17th Century, before the town bust its medieval walls, it held only 5,000.