Heartfelt Thoughts on Brandy

Brandy is its own multiverse, many wonderful drinks hiding under one collective noun – and I love most of them. Many people, I think, use “brandy” as a catch-all term to signify no more than some kind of alcoholic drink, just as many country and western tunes warble about “wine” for the simple reason that they can’t work “whisky” into the rhyme scheme.

I suspect some older people may avoid brandy because of unfortunate childhood experiences with cheap blackberry brandy, which in my and Diane’s parental homes was the inevitable nostrum for any stomach ailment or incipient cold. I remember it was even forced on our dog, because the poor springer spaniel was subject to painful cramps. It did relieve his cramps, but he sure didn’t like it. Nor did we children.

I’d guess that for most actual wine drinkers brandy usually means primarily or exclusively Cognac or Armagnac. This is far from a bad pair of choices, but brandy is a much richer field than that. Cognac and Armagnac are collective nouns too, covering distillates from differing zones – Ténarèze or Bas Armagnac, Fins Bois or Grand Champagne Cognacs, just as for instances – and differing ages of blends, as well as single-vintage bottlings. These can make mighty differences, differences I have come to relish.
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I remember, decades back Diane and I metro-ing out to the wilds of the Parisian slaughterhouse district to feast at Au Cochon d’Or and finish the meal with – the real reason we had ventured so far – very old Cognacs: a Borderies and a Grand Fine Champagne. The latter was an 1893, and was so ethereal it almost evaporated on the tongue.

In slightly later days, Diane and I visited the distinguished French Senator Abel Sempé for a tour of his Armagnac distillery and cellar. This included – lucky us! – a taste of his 1875, right from the cask in which it still reposed. Velvet fire, that warmed without burning, and felt weightless on the tongue, making absolutely clear why these drinks are called “spirits.” These are flavors you never forget, and they are what make “brandy” so much a richer trove than casual drinkers suspect.
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I won’t here go into all the pleasures of grappa – I’ve done enough of that in other posts – but I can’t not mention marc. (I guess I’m in a Francophile phase.) Almost every wine region in France has its own marc, distilled either from the pomace of local grapes, like grappa, or from regional wines. These are often very fine, though even in France they can be hard to find outside their home range. Such is the prestige of the two -ac brandies that everything else has become unfashionable. But Diane and I – confirmed spirits lovers as we are – have with just a little hunting enjoyed fine marcs from the Loire, from Champagne, from Hermitage and Châteauneuf du Pape, and especially from Burgundy, where the tradition of distilling and consuming marc seems to be still quite robust. We thank whatever gods may be for such small blessings.
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One final thought: I don’t want to ignore brandies made from fruits other than grapes. Some of those distillates are exquisite. Many respond beautifully to being chilled and served in an icy glass. As with some grappas, that treatment makes their aroma blossom, and also makes them an ideal digestif on a hot summer evening. Best known of the fruit distillates is the Norman and Breton specialty, Calvados (which, despite what I just said, is best served at room temperature). But Alsace in particular produces a wonderful array of fruit brandies – poire, framboise and framboise sauvage, and mirabelle, to name the most widely available ones. In Paris, once, far too many years ago, we acquired a bottle of eau de vie de pomme verte – green apple – that was an amazing summer digestif. Alas, we’ve never seen it since.
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My favorite of the ones we can get is framboise, whose heady raspberry aroma can be intoxicating before you even sip it. Diane’s is mirabelle, a rounder, softer distillate that captures perfectly the essence of the small golden plums that make it.

What more can I say? Brandy really is a multiverse, and this year it has ended many a dismal winter day for me on a much warmer, happier note than I could have ever expected from the grey skies that preceded it. New York may have had very little snow this year, but that didn’t prevent winter from being damp and chilly and depressing – the very kind of weather that propels me to the snifter I use to explore the multiverse.
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“Why Do We Have 37 Brandies?”

Back during the annual ritual known as spring cleaning – misnamed, I think: It should more properly be called spring messing – Diane asked me that question. I was momentarily dumbfounded, and all I managed to say was a lame “37?”

Many years ago, when she asked me a similar question – “Why do we have 44 bottles of grappa?” – I was able to confidently and truthfully say “Because I’m working on a big article on grappa for Decanter.”

That wasn’t the whole truth, as anyone who knows my fondness for grappa understands, but it was at least a plausible cover for my shameless indulgence. Back then, I could honestly claim to be the most important proponent of grappa in the US: I had published the first North American article about grappa back in the 80s, in Attenzione, and written about it in several other magazines as well – so I could, with a straight face, say I had a professional interest in that distillate.

But now that I am no longer an active wine journalist (except for this blog), how could I explain needing so many brandies?

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Had I not been taken by surprise, the answer was easy, really: They all have different uses, different niches that they fill. Just as I am passionate about matching a wine with food that will show it at its best (and vice versa), so am I interested in choosing the digestivo that will best complement the dinner I’ve just enjoyed.

That’s the real key for me: Call them brandies or digestivi or after-dinner drinks, whether it’s grappa or cognac or armagnac or marc, malt whiskies or curaçao or chartreuse, whatever their name, their function for me is to complete my meal, to round off the whole culinary experience. That may sound pompous, but it tends to be delicious – and figuring it all out is sheer fun.

So: Shameless self-indulgence once again, with a slight admixture of self-education. As Brillat-Savarin so well understood, a true gastronaut’s work is never done.

You can be forgiven for wondering what all those bottles are, and what niches I think they fill. A fair enough question, so here’s a broad rundown. For simplicity’s sake, let’s divide them, as those in the liquor trades often do, into “white goods” and “brown goods.”

White goods consist primarily of my beloved grappas, of which I like to keep a goodly selection on hand – grappas of Barbera and Dolcetto and Nebbiolo, Tuscan grappas, even southern Italian grappas, from Campania and Calabria and Sicily, all regions where this originally northern drink has gotten a firm hold.
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Each of these grappas differs from the others in basic ways, having the aromas and characters of the very different grapes from which they are made, and so meshing with very different meals. I take almost as much pleasure in making the right match as I do in actually drinking the grappa.

This category also includes tequilas, a class of drinks that I have been late in coming to appreciate, as well as eaux de vie of mirabelle, poire, and/or framboise, all offering a small explosion of fruit aromas and flavors. Served ice-cold, they can be by themselves a perfect summer dessert.
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Then we come to the brown goods, which will be more familiar to most people than the white. These may include barrel-aged grappas, but mostly they are cognac, armagnac, and an occasional marc. Burgundy and various appellations of the Rhône are my usual sources for marc.

I like to keep on hand a basic cognac and armagnac, as well as better bottle or two – a good vintage of armagnac, and for cognac a reliable producer’s more rarefied selection of vintages or areas of growth, such as Grand Champagne or Borderies. And not to forget Spanish brandies, which are very different in character from their French counterparts.
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Finally, I always need to have a few single malt scotches on hand, and Diane is occasionally fond of an herbal liqueur or plum brandy.
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Those bottles arm me for most contingencies and pretty much any sort of cooking my fair bride may wish to do; and that gives me a great sense of security and comfort, a very desirable condition for the aging wino. Also – I confess to a bit of showmanship – at the end of a dinner party, I like to set out 4 to 6 different bottles for our guests (and ourselves) to sniff and choose from. And that’s why we have 37 – or whatever the number may be now – bottles of brandy.

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P.S. from Diane, who has just counted them: It’s only 29 now. Poor baby!

P.P.S. from Tom: I must do something about that!

 

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Let Us Now Praise After-Dinner Drinks

I know summer is not supposed to be the time for thinking about, much less consuming, brandies, but I can’t help it: I’m addicted. For me, nothing completes an enjoyable dinner as well as a fine digestivo – or digestif, if you prefer. Whichever you call it, those names indicate exactly what that little tot does: Settle in the good food you’ve just ingested and comfortably begin the process of digesting it.

Not that I need to have eaten to the point of discomfort: far from it. I’m talking about a good, modest dinner, not a Coney Island hot dog eating contest. Perhaps in my distant youth I might have been interested in some such marathon, but these days I couldn’t even if I wanted to: Age and metabolic changes (they will come to all of us) have drastically reduced my consumption. Diane and I together now can’t finish a T-bone steak that once would have been just right for one of us. Our capacity is way down, but that doesn’t make a juicy piece of beef any less delicious:  Now more than ever, it’s quality that counts, not quantity – just as, with wine, it has always been quality that mattered more than alcohol.

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So the only question in my mind is not whether one should end a good meal with a little snocker of something, but with which one?  Armagnac?  Calvados? Cognac? A fruit eau de vie? Grappa?  Marc?  Tequila?  Single-malt whisky? And which one of the many in each category?  There’s no easy answer to that: Each has its niche. And it isn’t just a question of the great diversity of these drinks. No: It’s also the fact that each one of these spirits alters with the food you’ve consumed before it. That can be most obvious in the case of grappa, where the same specimen will sometimes smell freshly fruity and sometimes reek like aged Parmigiano, but it is equally true of spirits seemingly more well-defined, like Cognac or Armagnac, which, when they are not exactly what the doctor ordered, can be either too fiery or too sweet, depending on what foods they’re following.

I know only one way to determine which little tot to choose on any given evening: Pull the cork and sniff the bottle. Usually, the meal’s flavors in your mouth and scents in your nose will point to a broad category of spirits: an Alsace fruit eau de vie, or a Piedmontese or a Tuscan grappa, for instance. But after that, only taking a good sniff from a bottle or two or three will make clear to you whether you want Framboise or Poire, Barbera or Moscato, Sangiovese or Canaiolo – or maybe you want to go in a completely other direction and pour yourself a wee dram of peaty, smoky, seaweedy Oban or Talisker.

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I’ve enjoyed all of the above at different times and in different circumstances, and each has had its moment when it seemed like the only taste in the world that could fit that moment. Equally, I’ve had times when I sniffed the bottle and thought “Why in the world would I ever drink that?”  The process is always illuminating, and the result is always fun, haphazard as it may be.

What actually causes these changes, in the drink and/or in my perception of it, I don’t really know. Science has other things on its mind, and no wine journalist I know of has made a serious study of this phenomenon – but it strikes me as far more interesting and pertinent to day-to-day gastronomic contentment than the molecular composition of any of Ferran Adria’s foams. That’s not the chemistry I’m interested in. Much of my contentment and my health, both mental and physical, derive from the day-to-day experimental science of the table and its pleasures.

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Recently, I’ve been spending more time than I really want to with members of the medical profession – nothing life-threatening, but a few symptoms that are quality-of-life disturbing – and some MDs seem both unfamiliar with the concept of pleasure and incapable of pronouncing words like “wine” or “cognac” or even “beer.”  To the puritanical breed of White Coats, there is only Alcohol; and it’s all the same, and it’s a poison. No matter how healthy your liver and kidneys, brains and guts may be, it’s poison, and if you “use” it, you’re killing yourself.

I’ve given up asking such doctors whether metabolisms aren’t sufficiently different to make generalizations like that useless, and pointing out that I don’t plan to live forever and would willingly trade off a few years of gustatory boredom for a slightly shorter span of intense palatal pleasure. That’s my version of the choice of Achilles. Sadly, such MDs don’t seem to even comprehend the alternatives.

Not all are like that, of course: Occasionally I come across a sybarite who, while poking my torso in search of overripe spots, happily picks my brain for wine suggestions. Maybe I should bill them for the consultation?

All this is not as far off my subject as it might at first appear. It’s no accident that brandies and whiskies and that whole class of distilled drinks used to be known as cordials. They were thought to be – and I think they are – good for your heart. And remember, many are still called eaux de vie, and eau de vie means water of life. Now that I think of it, that too is what whisky means. I don’t think any of this etymological convergence is accidental. Stoking digestion is good for you, and doing so with a complex and delicious, gently fiery small glass of spirits (again, the word is no accident) is one of the more brilliant inventions of our flawed civilization.

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À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

As our long New York winter was drawing to its close, Diane and I found ourselves driven more and more to comfort foods – warm stews and braises – and lingering even longer than usual at table. We prolonged each dinner, and added warmth to each chilly evening, with a good brandy and conversation. The latter often enough turned on what we were eating and drinking – where we’d first had it, what was the best of it, where we’d had that. Inevitably, one evening, while sipping a lovely Sempé Armagnac, we began reminiscing about a 1981 trip we took through Armagnac country (Almost 30 years ago! How can that be?) and our meeting with the formidable Senator Sempé himself.

A present-moment interlude here, before lapsing into the pleasures of memory. As we drank and talked that evening, we discovered that the bottle of Sempé we were almost finishing – our favorite Armagnac, the one we turn to most days – was our last. This led to diligent searching over the next few days and, ultimately, the horrid discovery that we couldn’t find it anywhere in New York City or online. Catastrophe! And inexplicable to us.

Disaster was ultimately averted by a few purchases and some comparative tasting, the upshot of which was that Armagnac de Montal VSOP tasted enough like our beloved Sempé to fill the gap. We also liked Chateau de Laubade Bas Armagnac VSOP, but it was a bit sweeter and a touch more polished – not defects by any means, but they marked it for more specialized roles than our all-purpose Sempé.

Almost-empty Sempé and its colleagues

Back to the post-prandial discussion, which was almost derailed by differences in our recollections of a few key events. That led to Diane’s scouring her archives to find the journal that she kept of the trip and digging out – from our thousands of aging slides – some of the photos we took then. Ah, nostalgia! Oh, how I miss my dark hair and black moustache! Not to mention my then-amazing appetite! I could hardly believe the meals we ate then, at lunch and at dinner: Nowadays I’d live for a week on one or two of them – and I don’t regard that as an improvement, whatever the nutritionists may say.

Armagnac country overlaps foie gras country, which means that our days traveling therein were a gastronomic tour de force (all puns intended), with meals of foie gras cold and foie gras hot, duck in all forms, cèpes and potatoes seethed in duck fat, rich cheeses, and pastries redolent of butter, all washed down with Cahors and Madiran and other rough red country wines, and finally tamped down by a fine Armagnac. Most restaurants of any standing had a handsome selection of old Armagnacs, often spanning decades. I remember them as ethereal – the lightest spirits of air and fire – as well as effective, working like an intestinal rotorooter on those accretions of duck fat. Ah, then ‘twas bliss to be alive.

Here’s a sample day’s eating, from Diane’s journal, an October Saturday in Condom, the capital of the Armagnac zone:

Lunch at Cordeliers: menu gastronomique at 140 francs each. Salade d’écrevisses to start, about a half dozen succulent little beasts; no sauce offered and none needed. Then collops of lotte (monkfish) in sauce d’homard et épinards, the fish nicely gelatinous-chewy-tender, the sauce not too thick but just creamy enough. With these two courses we drank a bottle of Pacherenc. There followed aiguillettes de canard – not actual wings, but a magret sliced fanwise like the primary feathers of a bird’s wing. These came in a light brown sauce, unidentified but excellent. We drank a ’75 Madiran, which was quite different from the baby Madirans we’d had the night before – a wine deserving respect and even more aging. For dessert, Tom took fraises au crème fraiche and an île flottant; Diane had tarte au citron and the local flaky pastry thing whose name we’ve forgotten.

There followed an afternoon of visiting distillers and tasting Armagnacs, before we settled in for dinner at La Bonne Auberge:

We started with a salade de noix avec touts petits tranches de foie gras – Boston lettuce, escarole heart, walnut halves, walnut oil vinaigrette, and slices (not very petits) of a splendid foie gras. So much for our intentions of making a light dinner. Then we had palombes – the first of the season’s game: wood pigeons. They came with lovely browned balls of potato and cèpes sautéed in garlic and parsley. Palombes are terrific: dark, dark meat, rich and flavorful. More Madiran was required. We ended with coffee and île flottant with raspberry sauce – and Armagnac, of course – it was absolutely necessary for our survival.

The next day, we were brought to the Sempé distillery, where the Senator himself awaited us. This was no trivial event: The man was a distinguished member of the French Senate, and one of the few – perhaps the only – foreign citizen to be awarded the US Congressional Medal of Honor, for his role in rescuing downed American airmen in World War II.

Tom and Senator Sempe

And he had his standards. Before we were shown around the premises, we had to pass a little test – although, being a courteous Frenchman, he never identified it as such. Instead, I was simply presented with two small glasses of Armagnac and asked which of the two I preferred. For me it was no contest: The first glass was a nice Armagnac, round and warming, but the second glass was a whole other animal, at the same time fiery and smooth, mouth-filling and ethereal – a simply wonderful glass of spirits. I said so. Sempé said only: “It is the 1928. Would you like to visit the cellars?”

Gustave

Our guide, Gustave Ledun – the representative of the Armagnac association and a wonderful character in his own right – heaved a sigh of relief, and we all happily went on to taste some more splendid old Armagnacs from barrel and demijohn, culminating in an 1875 that was so light and spirituous that it all but evaporated on the tongue. A glorious visit, a grand brandy, a priceless memory. No wonder I love Armagnac.

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