23/08/2026
6 days in Charente. 14 houses. 60 samples for you.
One conclusion: here, cognac isn't distilled so much as inhabited.
We went in July to meet the families who make it. What we found: a cellar dug in 1492 that runs under half the town. Four stills standing side by side, dating from 1952, 1973, 2017 and 2019. A garden shed nobody had opened in decades, holding a hundred casks. Demijohns walled into an attic to hide them from the Germans, rediscovered in the 1990s, a cellar that floods by 65 cm every winter.
And running through every conversation, the same frustration: a product exported at 97%, hemmed in by rules that stop a producer telling you what's actually in the bottle.
The full journal is on Liquidex and there's a quiz at the end.
Get it right, win samples.
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