Cognac

once nought but medicine, this distinguished distillate of the grape has been for three centuries the headiest libation of them all

"Liqueur Brandy is Expensive," once remarked André Simon, the venerable international authority on liquor. "It is regrettable but unavoidable. When it is good it is worth its weight in gold; it should be worth more than gold, since there is so much more gold in the world than really fine liqueur cognac brandy." The price of gold is $35 an ounce. The most expensive cognac, Martell Extra, is about $32 for 24 ounces--fluid ounces, that is, which don't weigh as much as gold weighs. Anyway, you rarely drink gold unless you are habituated to a certain cordial in which float flecks of 22-kt. gold, the German potable goldwasser. (In your heart you know it's kummel.) While on an excursion to the home of cognac, which happens to be a small town actually called Cognac, in the département of the Charente, southwestern France, I asked Michel Martell about this Martell Extra. "Oh, it is most rare," he replied. "We don't ship more than 500 bottles of Martell Extra in a year." Other cognacs of the arm-and-leg category that may be found on the shelves of your neighborhood euphoria merchant include Hennessy Extra ($28.50), Hine Family Reserve ($25.75), Courvoisier Grande Fine Champagne ($25.50) and Bisquit Extra ($22.25). However, there are rare vintages of aged cognac for which cognac collectors pay fabulous prices. At a London auction, bottles of Hennessy Grande Fine Champagne cognac 1883, the last prephylloxera cognac from this area, brought $250 a bottle. At a New York auction in 1943, a bottle of 1783 Grande Champagne was valued at $1000.

Cognac collecting is no hobby for the average man. The great cognac library of our time was collected by J. P. Morgan the elder. When he died, in 1913, Morgan possessed over 15,000 items of rare wines and spirits. As Sir Joseph Duveen advised Andrew Mellon on what paintings to purchase, so restaurateur Louis Sherry counseled Morgan on his liquor choices. George C. Williamson, a British gastronome and friend of the financier, says that Morgan "had the finest collection of cognac ever assembled by any one private individual. Mr. Morgan took pride in his fine brandies and he loved them better than any of his wines. There were over a thousand bottles of the rarest cognacs in the world and the two bins that Mr. Morgan valued more than any were his 1824 and his 1842, every bottle of which bore his own initials upon bottle and cork. To open one of these treasured bottles for one of his friends was the greatest compliment Mr. Morgan could pay him."

While Morgan may be the prince of cognac collectors, the unchallenged king of cognac imbibers was Winston Churchill. In his heyday, Churchill drank a bottle of cognac every night. "Churchill's consumption of fine old French brandy has been praised by virtuosi at the tippler's art," wrote Robert Lewis Taylor in his Winston Churchill: An Intimate Biography. Several years before he died, Churchill suffered a heart attack. Then he fell and fractured his hip. Field Marshal Montgomery visited him in the hospital. He reported that he found Churchill "roaring with vigor, sitting up and calling for more cognac. The moment Sir Winston gives up cognac, you will know he is seriously ill." In several magazine articles, Churchill wrote of the glories of wine and brandy. "The use of intoxicants is one of the distinguishing marks of the higher types and races of humanity. The story of wine is the story of human culture," he said. One sometimes got the feeling, as Taylor did, that in Churchill's philosophy, wine became a religious symbol, God was the Master Distiller, and cognac brandy was His Supreme Distillation. He agreed with Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said, "Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy."

Until he was past 90, Churchill still drank four or five slugs of cognac a night. It is possible that it was Churchill's lifelong addiction to cognac that kept him hale and hearty. There is a school of thought that holds that brandy is a healthful, rejuvenating fluid that beats vitamins, minerals, antibiotics and four-way cold tablets. There have been doctors who have recommended brandy as being good for practically everything that ails you. It has been recommended for colic and flatulence; for relief of nervous tension; for the prevention and relief of the common cold; even for relief of symptoms in cardiac ailments, including severe spasms of angina pectoris. By all odds, the most enthusiastic medical endorser of brandy is Dr. George H. Jackson, author of The Medicinal Value of French Brandy. He not only praises cognac as a remedy for heart conditions and as a stimulant for the appetite but he states he has also and satisfactorily prescribed cognac in the treatment of dyspepsia, fever, diarrhea, migraine, neuralgia, asthma, influenza, cholera, grippe, typhoid--and dig this, my fellow tosspots--for the prompt relief of delirium tremens.

Personally, while I'm not unhappy that cognac has beneficial healthful properties, I have never regarded it as a medicine. I think one vulgarizes brandy if one puts it in the same category as cough syrups and blood-building tonics. For liqueur cognac brandy, sipped slowly and thoughtfully and imaginatively, can give you the most intense, the most subtle, the most nuance-filled series of sensations in the entire range of gastronomy. And before it is tasted it is smelled, it is inhaled, it is experienced by the nose. And for God's sake, don't drink cognac out of one of those phony enormous balloon snifters, with their fat bellies and the mouth of the glass narrowing so that the cognac fumes are concentrated and knock your smell out. No, serve it in a large wineglass, perhaps a tulip glass, whose mouth slopes in slightly.

You tilt the glass of cognac to your lips and you inhale the aroma and it immediately makes the grape and the wine come alive and prepares your palate for the sensations to come. A matured cognac tastes like no other potable. As it slowly is taken into your mouth, it actually penetrates, first, the roof of your mouth, then the floor of your mouth, the inside of your cheeks, your tongue and then makes its way down your throat and into your stomach, creating a warm sensation wherever it goes, like a stunning woman walking through a crowded restaurant to a table in the back. This sensation of penetration, of spreading into the skin, is the defining characteristic of a good cognac. The French call it largeur--broadness. An inferior cognac is said to be "short." It doesn't penetrate, it doesn't spread. A good cognac spreads and lingers.

How do you choose a good bottle of cognac? Maurice Healy, an English bon vivant, once asked this question of Oddenino, who operated a very fashionable London restaurant during the 1920s. "You want to buy some good brandy?" Oddenino replied. "It is easy. First you go out to Cognac in a good vintage year. Then you find a reliable vigneron. Then you buy your brandy from him. Then you keep it in cask for twenty years. Then you bottle it. Oh, it's easy. Of course, you will be careful to choose a good year; it's most important to choose an honest vigneron. There will be others looking for him, too. Indeed, Mr. Healy, it might be better for you to go to a good wine merchant."

Since you can count the serious American wine merchants on the fingers of a dozen hands, the ambitious imbiber will have to rely on the marques of the great houses. There are many cognac brands. While dining in the Coq d'Or, which is in Cognac, the patron, Raymond Page, showed me no less than 103 different brands of cognac that he stocks. Here, in alphabetical sequence, are the most commonly encountered labels in the U. S.--all of which can be unhesitatingly trusted: Barriasson, Bisquit, Briand, Courvoisier, Delamain, Denis-Mounié, Exshaw, Hardy, Hennessy, Hine, Martell, Monnet, Otard, Polignac, Remy Martin, Robin and Salignac.

Until 1920, the great cognac houses shipped vintage brandies as well as blended ones. British cognac connoisseurs still write lovingly of the 1878 Martell, the 1865 Hennessy Superior Pale, the Otard 1831, the Hine 1875. Nowadays, in order to achieve a continuity of high quality, the cognac merchants no longer package vintage cognacs, although some houses will ship a few cases of vintage wet goods to a few favored dealers. Sherry Wine and Spirits, a New York dealer, currently offers two vintage cognacs: a Briand Grande Fine 1906 and their own label of 1934 vintage. The best vintage years of this century are 1900, 1904, 1906, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1933, 1934, 1939, 1942, 1947. No vintage cognac is on sale later than 1947, since it takes at least 15 years for a fine cognac to mature.

I asked Peter Greig, who was a leading wine merchant in his palmy days and has now retired to the profession of wine-and-spirits consultant, whether vintage cognac was better than non-vintage cognac. "Only if you find a vintage cognac you really like," he said. "Then you couldn't ask for anything finer. But, in all frankness, sir, my personal taste is for nonvintage cognac, as it is for nonvintage champagne. You know what you're getting every time. I don't deny that sometimes you'll run into a vintage cognac that has the bouquet, the finesse, the flavor that is just what suits you--but usually it won't have everything you want; it may lack roundness or body or a certain nobility you want, and so I would recommend that you stick with the nonvintage cognacs of the established houses."

Probably the most enduring myth about cognac is that there exist certain rare and delicious brandies from the age of Napoleon. Monsieur Page showed me no fewer than 15 different brands calling themselves Napoleon brandies. I put the question to an executive of the Bureau National du Cognac one afternoon.

"I tell you," he answered, "that around here in Cognac the expression Napoleon brandy does not mean anything, as it is not known what brandy Napoleon drank or even if he personally liked brandy altogether. The idea that there is something called Napoleonic brandy and that if one spends much money one can buy some miraculous boisson from the year 1805, this is crazy. If the cognac was bottled and the cork kept damp, it would not have changed in flavor. If it was kept in barrels, it would taste boisé, it would steenk too much of the wood and be altogether undrinkable. Furthermore, there does not exist on the market any cognac of those years." The oldest cognac available at the Coq d'Or was an 1840 Castillon Grande Fine. So forget Napoleon as any criterion of age or quality in a brandy. Also forget Francis I (Otard), Charles X (Otard), Louis XIV (Martell), Prince Napoleon (Exshaw).

All cognacs can be divided into two parts: the three-star or young light brandies; and the mellow, aged, noble liqueur cognacs that, in order of quality and age and price, are labeled V. S. O. P. (Very Superior Old Pale), Fine Champagne, Grande Champagne, XO (Extra Old), Extra Vieille (Extra Old) and X or Extra (Extra). The Charente is divided by government regulation into seven districts. The district that produces the finest cognac is the Grande Champagne, in which 24,000 acres are planted to grapes. The next area is known as Petite Champagne--22,000 acres. Then come the Borderies and Fins Bois. Ninety percent of all first-class cognac comes from these four areas. The higher the proportion of Borderies and Fins Bois in a blend, the lower the price. It is possible to buy authentic French cognac for as little as five dollars a fifth. The Borderies produce a rich, full-bodied cognac, which some connoisseurs prefer to the more elegant and subtle Grande and Petite Champagnes.

Every respectable liquor library should have two bottles of cognac--one of the young light group and one of the liqueur group. In seeking out a cognac for post-prandial degustations, you will want a well-aged liquid of pungent aroma and largeur. More important than the initials V. S. O. P. are these two phrases: "fine champagne" or "grande fine champagne." By French law, any bottle marked "fine champagne" must be a blend of cognacs from only Grande Champagne and Petite Champagne, the (continued on page 160)Cognac(continued from page 78) first-class districts. "Grande fine champagne" means that the cognacs in the blend are exclusively from the finest brandy-producing area in the world. Grande Champagne cognac, because of its high acidity, is more amenable to long aging, and the longer cognac is aged--at least up to 50 years--the smoother and more palatable it becomes. But these are very much matters of personal taste. The older a cognac, usually, the higher the price.

If you get hooked on cognac, you will find yourself consuming about six bottles of light cognac to one of liqueur cognac. And if you dabble in cocktails, you will also use the young brandy for the basic ingredient of such classic compositions as the sidecar, the alexander, the French 75 and the stinger. It would be sacrilegious to mix a V. S. O. P. or older grande fine cognac, however, with anything except the saliva in your mouth.

The sidecar, alas, has almost vanished from the scene, which is a shame. It was and is a mouth-puckering tart concoction of the same genre as the daiquiri, the margarita and the whiskey sour. During the jazz age, in the 1920s, the sidecar was the hip cocktail of the fast set, of the flappers and the sheiks. The sidecar has cognac and the juice of a lemon and a dash of Cointreau or triple sec. The alexander, which is even deader than the sidecar, was a popular drink during Prohibition among teenagers who wanted to emulate their elders but couldn't stomach the terrible taste of bootleg gin. The alexander was made with brandy, sweet cream and crème de cacao. It was very big with girls who wanted to make the scene but hated to drink. It looked innocent and tasted like an ice-cream soda. However, the alexander was a deceptive drink. After three or four alexanders, the girl would experience a strange and overpoweringly erotic sensation all through her body, and if the time and the place were right, she became not only willing but ardent. More girls probably became pregnant as a result of guzzling brandy alexanders than from any other single cause during the 1920s. However, as a middle-of-the-road hedonist, I am glad to see the alexander go into the dustbin of history--but not because it was conducive to sexual immorality. It didn't taste good. In fact, let's face it, the alexander is just plain nauseating.

On the other hand, the stinger deserves immortality. It is cold, it is bracing, it is the perfect libation for an evening of pub crawling. Into a shaker containing cracked ice, you pour three ounces of brandy and one of white crème de menthe and shake strenuously until your arms are tired. The French 75--named for a powerful cannon of World War One--is a dynamite boisson that is guaranteed to do you absolutely no good. It's brandy and soda--except instead of soda you splash champagne into a highball glass containing a jigger of cognac. People who love champagne despise the French 75. People who love cognac despise the French 75. It's a kick in the head. I think I ought to put in here that Winston Churchill, though he was hooked on champagne and cognac separately, had no use for the French 75, which he called an "odious cocktail." Even the French don't drink it.

There is something about the subject of cognac that seems to bring out the worst of the normal human tendency to make mistakes. There is hardly a single magazine article published in the U. S. about cognac within the past ten years that does not contain egregious errors and historical howlers. The accepted library standard reference work, Grossman's Guide to Wines, Spirits and Beers by Harold J. Grossman, is replete with absurdities. For instance, take the explanation of how stars came to be put on cognac labels. Grossman's version--which he got the Lord only knows where, as I can find no French or English authority who has printed this nonsense--is written up in more polished fashion by another author, William E. Massee, in Wines and Spirits. Massee tells us: "The custom of putting stars on the bottle is said to have begun in 1811, the Year of the Comet, when sensational wines were made all over Europe. The next year was great, too, so a second star was added to the label, and so was the next, which called for another star."

Anybody who will believe this will believe that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. It is easy to knock down the "three-star" fairy tale. "Until 1860, cognac was shipped only in barrels," states Robert Delamain, in his Histoire du Cognac. The wine merchant bottled the cognac and affixed his own label, which sometimes also included the name of the distiller. Furthermore, while it's true that an unusually large comet showed in 1811, it was not a vintage year for cognac. Nor was 1812 nor 1813. These years are never mentioned by 19th Century tosspots as being great years.

"My grandfather, Maurice Hennessy, invented the three-star label because he believed stars were a symbol of merit," Killian Hennessy, great-great-grandson of the Irish founder of the house, told me. "It had nothing to do with comets. It was in 1865, after we began bottling our brandies. The idea was so good that everybody copied it. We have already discontinued the three-star designation for our young cognac in France and we are now starting to do this in your country as well. Our light cognac we call Bras Arme."

• • •

In delving into the history of cognac, I sometimes had the feeling that the American writer studies the works of Baron Munchausen, "Parson" Mason Locke Weems and the Brothers Grimm, and then retires to his study with a bottle of fine old cognac and lets his imagination run riot as he composes apocrypha. According to Harold Grossman--and, I repeat, the American Library Association's Booklist recommends his Guide as the standard reference work on alcoholic subjects--commercial distillation of cognac began in the 16th Century when, while taking a cargo of local wine from La Rochelle, Charente's chief port, to Holland, a "bright Dutch shipmaster" decided he could save space by "eliminating the water" in the wine and just shipping the distillation. On arriving "in Holland with his 'concentrated wine,' his Dutch friends liked it as it was. It would be a waste of water to make it wine again. Thus the brandy trade had its inception. The Dutch called the new product brantywein (burnt wine), presumably because fire, or heat, was used in [its] distillation. In time, this term was anglicized to the present-day word--brandy."

In an extremely lengthy and accurate article on brandy, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition) makes a point of specifically declaring that the name "brandy" is not derived from the High German or the High Dutch, but from the Old English word brandewine, brandwine or brandy wine. The word "brand," common to all Teutonic languages of northern Europe, means "a thing burning or that has been burned." Until 1670, Englishmen called distilled wine "brandywine," and then it was shortened to brandy. As for the flying Dutchman, he is not even hinted at in Delamain's history of cognac, or in Dujardin's Recherches Retrospectives sur l'Art de la Distillation or in Claquesin's Histoire des Liqueurs. He has never been mentioned in the bulletins of the Archaeological and Historical Society of the Charente, which has published many researches into the early history of cognac distillation. He does not exist, never did exist and never could have existed.

Grape brandy was first produced in a medical laboratory in the last part of the 13th Century and it was intended to be a medicine. What Dr. Fleming was to penicillin, Arnold of Villanova was to cognac. He discovered it. He described exactly how he made it. He described its effects on the human physiology. Arnaldus (1235--1313) was a Spanish scientist who had studied chemistry and medicine under the great Arabian medieval teachers. The Arabian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan had perfected an improved alembic (or still) around 800 A.D. The technique of distillation, however, was thousands of years old. All scholarly histories of chemistry--which has its roots in alchemy--trace distilling back to the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians and Greeks. India was producing a distilled spirit, arrack, in 800 B.C. Alchemists during the Middle Ages were constantly experimenting with various distillations.

In the 14th Century, Europe was ravaged by the bubonic plague, the black death, which killed one out of every three persons. Arnold carried on his experiments in distillation in a desperate attempt to find a cure for the bubonic plague. He never found a cure for it, but he did find a cure for the essential agony of being human, of experiencing anxiety in the face of the unknown. In his work Speculum Alchiae, this extraordinary man described exactly how he made grape brandy. He claimed that, taken during epidemics, it would "maintain youth" and "prolong life." He gave us most of the phrases we use to describe alcohol: eau de vie (or in the Gaelic, whiskey, which means the same thing); he was the first to call alcohol "spirits," because he believed it was the spirit or soul of the wine; and he sometimes called it "eau-de-feu," which was what the American Indians called whiskey--that is, "firewater"--when the pioneers traded them whiskey for furs. In his Breviarum Practicae, Arnold listed hundreds of formulas for drugs, in which herbs and roots were compounded with his grape brandy. Among the plants he used were clove, sweet William, anise seed, juniper berries, citron, cassia, fennel, angelica and absinthe.

Arnold's grape brandy--and the brandy produced in France for 300 years--was terrible in taste and smell. He did not know the fine art of distilling a potable spirit. And so, when people in France began distilling and selling grape brandy in trade from the 1400s on, they continued to infuse the raw brandy with various herbs and berries and spices in order to make it palatable. Its sickening smell was disguised by infusions of rose leaves, orange flowers and jasmin.

Brandy was widely produced all over France except in one place--the region of Cognac itself. The vignerons of the Charente regarded their wine as superb and they did an excellent business and had been doing an excellent business since the year 1100, shipping wine up the Charente river and the English Channel to Amsterdam and London merchants. Their wine was even shipped to the Baltic countries and to Scandinavia. During the 1630s, there were high taxes put on wine in the Charente. A depression ensued. The farmers were impoverished. Wine spoiled. There were bloody uprisings of the agricultural laborers, a Jacquerie. The wine brokers of London, Amsterdam and La Rochelle told the farmers they had better boil the wines in alembics and convert them into eaux de vie. They were outraged. What--waste the little wood they had in the forests on spoiling good wine! Destroy the precious lumber they needed for building houses and heating them and cooking food! They'd see King Henri IV damned to hell before they'd make any of this stinking, evil-smelling "burned wine."

Then came a more serious crisis. Their vines suffered a mysterious change. Perhaps they were attacked by a fungus. French chemists who have investigated the change Charente wines underwent in the 17th Century are not certain. But suddenly the wine became enfeebled. It couldn't "travel well." It was spoiled when it arrived at its destination. Merchants refused to pay for the rotten wine. So in this crisis, they had to turn to brandy. And, in the next 100 years, they refined and perfected a method of pot-still distillation with which, by dint of controlling the fires at a certain temperature and watching fanatically as the white alcohol slowly dripped, drop by drop, and by giving it two distillations, the second being the repassement, and by rectifying the "heads" and "tails" of the first distillation, and, in short, by caring intensely about their product, these individualistic farmers made an eau de vie so pure and so clean and so sweet-smelling that it could be drunk straight--without disguising the smell or the taste with herbs and sweet-smelling flowers. By 1700 it was the most sought-after eau de vie in the European market.

But even so, even with all its superiority to competing eaux de vie, this primitive Charente brandy was still not cognac as we know it today. For this, something else was required, and this something else was also the result of an accident. During the 1730s, there were a succession of rich harvests in the Charente, an oversupply of the wine that is the raw material of cognac and, consequently, an abundance of the latter. Prices sank. Those farmers who lived only from one season to another were compelled to sell their cognac at distress prices. But other farmers, who could withstand the slump and hold out, refused to throw their cognac on the market. They laid away that year's cognac in oak barrels. They gambled on the future. Sooner or later, there would be a season of a poor harvest and the prices would inevitably rise. That they knew. But what would happen to the cognac if it remained in cask for a year, two years, three years? Would it deteriorate? Would everything be lost? Until then, nobody dreamed that alcohol mellowed when it was sleeping in oaken barrels. All that they prayed for was that the cognac would stay as it was. And eventually there were lean harvests and the foresighted risk takers suddenly made great profits when the price of cognac soared in England and northern Europe.

By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, cognac brought the highest price in the world market. Yet between 1730 and 1795, speculation raged wildly in the cognac district. From the time England blockaded the Continent and the Charente was cut off from its richest market, the cognac trade changed. Previously, the longest cognac had aged was two or three or, at most, five years. But now it had to lie in the casks for as long as 15 or 20 years. In this way the distillers and farmers learned that the cognac of the Borderies, the Grande Champagne, the Petite Champagne, was amenable to a lengthy aging process, and now there began the modern era of putting cognac aside for reserve and no longer speculating on future shortages and gambling with land and stocks and rising and falling values in pounds and francs. Now the chemists began to study the science of alcohol and aging and grape brandy. And the cognac houses developed methods of building and curing their barrels before they put the brandy in. Yes--even the barrels are aged before the cognac is put in to age.

In the large low stone buildings they call chais, the barrels are neatly stacked, two barrels on the floor and one barrel sitting between the two--long rows of three barrels like this, every barrel stamped with its year and the name of the distillery and the section. The air seeps through the porous oak and oxygen goes into the cognac, causing it to change in color, taste and chemical composition. The white eau de vie that dripped out of the still slowly becomes yellow, then golden, then beige and gradually a burnished amber. It is becoming cognac--not merely a "burned wine."

The cognac, as it grows older, acquires a liquidity so soft it kisses your tongue and the lining of your mouth when you imbibe it. And a whole range of smells is brought out by the oak barrels and the tannin in the oak and the oxygen mingling with the cognac. The great houses tie up millions upon millions of dollars of capital in this aging cognac, these sleeping beauties of alcohol, this "sleeping gold," as they call it. At the time of this writing, Martell has 65,000 barrels in stock. Hennessy, with the largest reserve, has over 100,000 barrels sleeping, of which 30,000 consist of brandy five years or younger. Through evaporation, every barrel loses four percent a year, and it must be filled to capacity from other barrels of the same year and distillery once a year. In the chais are stacked these thousands of barrels, and the air reeks with the fumes of cognac. This, say the Charentais, is the share of the angels. And in the narrow cobblestoned ancient streets of Cognac, in the streets near the chais, the air is also perfumed with the lingering aroma of evaporating cognac. By the great and beautiful castle in which Francis I was born, the Château of Cognac, owned by Otard, which looms like a battlemented medieval stronghold lying on the banks of the slow-moving Charente river, a river at times no wider than a canal, the cognac fills the air, for Otard ages its cognac right in the castle itself. And all through this city and the nearby cities such as Jarnac, the angels are sipping their share of the cognac. It is right that the angels should participate. For the production and aging of cognac is, in a way, a profound act of faith. It is based on an assumption that there will be a future and that there will be men in this future who will not be savages but who will delight themselves by inhaling and tasting and swallowing cognac after a good dinner with good friends, and that there will be a time and a place to sit, in one's house, in a restaurant, in a club, and talk to one's friends as one slowly, thoughtfully sips a cognac that is right now sleeping in a barrel that is 20 barrels down the line in a chai in Jarnac--and that this particular barrel may be mingled with the cognacs out of 12 or 14 or 24 other cognacs from as many barrels to make the blending of somebody's XO or V. S. O. P. Fine Champagne.

The master blender is, ultimately, the virtuoso of each house. Like so many other noble human activities, the art of making cognac is a mixture of petty motivations and glorious ideals. It began as medicine, as a weapon against bubonic plague. It developed into greatness because of wild speculations and greed. There is a sort of aesthetics in cognac, as well--a longing for beauty. And the artisan of it is this blender who, working mainly with his nose and his palatal memory of thousands of cognacs from a variety of vintages and vineyards that he has sampled in his lifetime, puts together the great blends of the great houses.

"He who composes liqueurs," wrote Polycarpe Poncelet in his Chemistry of Taste and Smell a hundred years ago, "is akin to a composer of symphonies, but he is also a scientist, for he must know intimately the natural laws as well as he must know the harmonic principles. If the blender dreams of achieving greatness in his art, he must know the laws of nature and of the human body, for his object is nothing less than to produce in the human being an agreeable sensation of heightened well-being, which we may call absolute health."