Nick Faith 1933 – 2018
It would be difficult for me to write another Technical Topic without mentioning Nick Faith who very sadly passed away on 26 September 2018. Nick was a friend whom I have known for more than 25 years. But he was more than that, He was a giant in the cognac industry.
As a financial journalist Nick wrote regularly in the Financial Times and the Economist. He also wrote many books on drink. His first, called The Winemasters, was published in 1978 and won the André Simon Award. Another, and one of his finest was a rather grand full-sized book with many illustrations but actually, he was best known for his book simply called Cognac. It was first published in 2004 (the last edition was published in 2013) and is regarded by many as the Standard in the industry. Here at Hermitage, we still use it occasionally for reference. In 1996 he founded the International Spirits Challenge and in 2010 he was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Bureau National Interprofessional de Cognac (BNIC), the ruling body of Cognac. As a fellow traveller to the Cognac region, Nick loved to visit us here at Hermitage Cognacs and talk about the industry, tasting our cognacs and finishing up with lunch and a beer before I took him back to Chippenham to return on the train, another of his loves.
Nick Faith will be sorely missed, not just as a great authority on cognacs but as an inspiration to the industry, he was one of the Cognac Greats.