The first luxury spirit shipped around the world, direct from the of Rémy Martin since 1874, there’s a reason Louis XIII came to be known as the King of Cognacs. Aged for up to a hundred years, by the time the decanters reached their destinations, they had already been witness to decades of history. And then they were enjoyed: Ceremonial balls in the courts of Russian Tzars, the maiden voyage of the in 1935, the supersonic flight of Concorde in 1984 – all were toasted with a glass of Louis XIII cognac.
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth sipped it during a dinner in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, just before the outbreak of World War Two, and after the Allied Victory in 1945, Charles De Gaulle ordered it in for his soldiers' first liberated Christmas. With its iconic crystal-spiked decanter, Louis XIII has been behind closed doors with some of history’s most powerful names, and some of its most glamorous artists. So as the King of Cognacs celebrates the 150th anniversary of its first bottling, and the House of Rémy Martin enters its third century of luxury spirit production, where better to indulge in the lifestyle of Louis XIII than Cognac itself? How best to learn what makes Rémy Martin spirits so special than to spend a weekend in the Grande Champagne terroir and see, quite literally, how history is made.
Except the first thing I realised as we were greeted atop the vineyards of Julliac-Le-Coq distillery, is that in Grande Champagne it’s actually quite challenging to see anything. Everywhere you look, the sun is reflecting off the chalk that gives the Cru its name (literally: big, chalky soil). The façades of the houses lining the cobbled streets, the steeple of the Roman church that pokes up behind the rolling hills, and, yes, the flecks of white stones marbling the soil wherever we stand.
Squinting as my eyes adjust to the glare, I’m told that the local chalk is fundamental to the legendary taste of Louis XIII, and Rémy Martin’s cognacs writ large. One of our disarmingly suave hosts, Alex, manages to make the ins and outs of viticulture a charming conversation to have over champagne. The hefty chunks of chalk in the soil, he says, voice lilting, mean the roots of the grapevines have to work harder to burrow their way to water.
None of the moist loamy luxury of the Bourgeois here: these vines have to pull themselves down by their knotty bootstraps if they want to survive the Winter. Once they have, though, the grapes they produce are hardier, and the eaux-de-vie they eventually become can be aged for far longer than the vast majority of other cognacs. (For those, like me, who needed a brief masterclass in the technical terms of spirit-making, an eaux-de-vie is what you get from the double distillation of grapes: this is blended and aged to give you cognac.
) Elsewhere, an average eaux-de-vie blend might spend six months or so developing in a barrel: for Rémy Martin, six years is positively juvenile. , and all that. An VSOP might age for a decade, an XO might not see daylight for four, and, as we know, when eaux-de-vie are selected to make up a batch of Louis XIII, they could be ageing till 2124.
And it’s not just the chalky soil that makes Rémy Martin’s cognac so beloved by the great and the gilded. Every aspect of the terroir contributes to the taste, the flavour, the ageing process of the spirits – including, actually, the aspect of the land itself. The angle of the vineyard on the hills, the dancing of the light hitting the vines as it reflects off the sea: everything is hyper-local, the production of the spirit is completely threaded through the ecosystem of Grande Champagne.
Even the mustard and fennel flowers, left to grow wildly between the alleys like something out of Fragonard, are more than mere mannerist ornamentation. As the climate changes, the composition of the soil alters, allowing these natural wildflowers to sprout up among the vines pull together and enrich the ground. This is the kind of knowledge that can only be passed down through generations of experience: throughout the centuries that Rémy Martin has spent in Cognac, local families have worked with the house to farm, grow, harvest, and distil.
This local expertise, the , has built up over the house’s history, and is as much a part of the terroir as the soil we stand on. Indeed, the group of growers waving as they walk past us are wearing sunglasses, but it might not be because of the glare. Rémy Martin just turned the streets of Cognac into a funfair for the locals to celebrate their 300th anniversary.
Bespoke cocktails, good company, and copious amounts of cognac. One game had revellers throwing hoops over a magnum of Louis XIII: no, the winner did not get the bottle. Before we head inside to see the distillation process, the sommelier, Cedric, offers us the first of many, Sidecars we’ll drink over the weekend.
It’s a reminder that cognac need not only be a fireside : Rémy Martin 1738, cointreau, and, instead of lemons, – a sour, refreshing juice squeezed directly from the vineyard’s grapes. Like everything around here, it’s expertly-made and completely local. One hundred days after the first flowers bloom on the grapevines, it’s time to begin harvesting and distillation – so says the strict natural calendar that dictates life around Grande Champagne.
Vans of grapes cascade into huge steel vats for crushing, before being twice distilled and aged to produce the eaux-de-vie. The swan necks of the copper potsils criss-cross the ceiling of the warehouse, a startling laboratory tucked away in the idyllic Cognac countryside. Local laws state that there must always be an open flame under the distillation chambers, and in bygone years a local grower would sleep by the warmth of the log fires, occasionally cracking open the foie gras and hosting a dinner party as the juices steamed and bubbled away any impurities.
Nowadays, they use biogas, but if our lunch is anything to go by, foie gras is still very much on the menu. Freshly distilled eaux-de-vie is an acquired taste. One drop percolates on your tongue and it’s like a kamikaze pilot has flown a lime tree into the back of your throat.
Add some water and things round out a little – lime turns to pear. Of course, the only person whose tasting notes really matter at this stage (or, indeed, any) is Baptiste Loiseau. The youngest cellar master in the history of Rémy Martin, Baptiste can detect literally hundreds of individual flavours in a glass of cognac.
After distillation and the first round of ageing, he and his tasting committee will examine hundreds of glasses of eaux-de-vie a day (they cannot, for the sake of liver health and hospital bills, taste these raw materials; for a pallet as sensitive as Baptiste’s, smell is more than enough). Having worked his way through the year’s harvest, the cellar master will understand the potential of each batch: Which might age best in more humid conditions? Which sets could blend best with each other? Which, if any, could go on to reach the apotheosis of a Grand Champagne grape – inclusion in a Louis XIII barrel? Having decided the fates of each and every glass, Baptiste okays that year’s batch for a journey to the cellars, where, if they’re lucky, they won’t leave for a century or more. ‘Be careful not to take any pictures,’ our guide says in the depths of the Rémy Martin cellars, ‘the flash might cause an explosion.
’ Before I put my phone away, I take a panicked glance at the photo I had snapped two minutes earlier, an attempt to capture the towering pyramids of barrels surrounding us in the sickly sweet air. It’s an awful picture, certainly not worth the immediate immolation of the world’s most illustrious cognac house (unlikely to be covered on insurance), but now its blurry frame reminds me of the rows upon rows of casks ageing beneath the ground. Each year, four per cent of the eaux-de-vie ageing in these cellars evaporates into the air – hence the plummy smell and risk of spontaneous combustion.
Known as the Angels’ Share, four per cent may not sound like a particularly pious devotion, but with 30 cellars, each with 6000 barrels, that’s a pretty significant tipple for the Heavenly Host. The real culprit is , a charming fungus that feeds on alcohol fumes, and covers the walls of the cellars with a layer of what looks like soot. Lucky fungus, to be feasting on Louis XII.
Be not afraid. Though of course, not every spore buds equally. Not every cellar contains a potential barrel of Louis XIII.
If I could tell you which ones did I’d currently be on the run from the police somewhere in the north of France. No, written in chalk on each pyramid of blending, ageing eaux-de-vie is a secret code that only Baptiste, and the cellar masters who came before him, can decrypt. We are truly in the cellar master’s domain here.
Baptiste would constantly assess the contents of each barrel, deciding how long to age the eaux-de-vie, where to move a certain blend to best develop the flavour, and determining when a one hundred year batch might finally be ready for bottling. As we sip the eaux-de-vie during our cellar tour, our talk about the way its flavour develops across the decades in language that sounds touchingly humane. Twenty years in, the batch is ‘a teenager: exuberant, lots to say’.
It tastes buttery, like a childhood spent baking. By fifty, the taste matures, becomes fruitier, and (much like a person), noticeably rounder. After we coat a glass with the developing cognac, swilling it around and tasting it, we are told to hurl the leftovers back to the earth and make a wish – another glass, probably.
For a Louis XIII, as it approaches its centenary, it is happily housed in its Limousin oak barrel, married to its appropriate partner. The fragrance profiles are at this point so subtly blended that Coco , when she would drink Louis XIII at the Ritz, would never finish her glass. Instead, she would dab the last drops of cognac onto her wrists and wear it as perfume for the rest of the day.
According to Baptiste, the fragrance reminds him, aptly, of the immortelle flowers that grow around his childhood home in Cognac. And in his role, Baptiste must have an interesting relationship with immortality. The moment a cellar master discovers an eaux-de-vie that will make up a Louis XIII, they know they won’t live to see it in a decanter.
Likewise, when they finally send the oldest batches into the world, they know they are passing on the legacy of a cellar master who first tasted the spirit one hundred years ago. To mastermind the legacy of a Rémy Martin cognac is to work with time as your raw material. An exercise in future-telling and communicating with the memories of those who came before you.
Tasting notes are passed down in great tomes, housed in a local museum, consulted and contributed to by cellar masters throughout the centuries. On extremely rare occasions, maybe once or twice in the lifetime of a cellar master, they might taste one batch that they cannot bring themselves to blend, so stunning is their emotional response to it. This is aged and bottled as a Rare Cask – as instantly iconic as a Great Comet.
In 2023, Baptiste discovered his own Rare Cask, a moment considered a great honour, and great personal responsibility for any cellar master. He noticed its floral notes, which, he says, transported him back to the dried roses in his grandfather’s garden. When Rare Cask 42.
1 was launched in , for £38,000, Rémy Martin celebrated with a dinner held in the cloisters of Abbey, just days after the Coronation. The House’s oldest barrels are housed in the Andre Heriard Dubreuil cellar, named after the grandfather of Rémy Martin’s current chairwoman, Marie Amelie de Leusse. We walk down a staircase in the centre of the room, further into the earth than we’ve ventured before.
Here, behind steel grates like prison , lie a set of tierćons – the 18th-century barrels that would have carried Louis XIII down the river Charente and out the courts of Europe. A single spider dangles down from the cask closest to us, but in this most historical of halls even the cobwebs have a role to play. Spiders eat bugs, and bugs eat barrels.
This eight-legged friend of the house is busy protecting centuries of heritage, lit only by the glow from Rémy Martin’s iconic centaur logo on the stone walls. It was Paul-Émile Rémy Martin who decided on the centaur in the late 19th Century. Already a scion of the Rémy Martin wine-making family, he thought it was time to elevate the brand to the upper echelons of luxury.
Taking inspiration from his Sagittarian star sign, he thought back to his school days, where in Greek lessons he would have studied the mythological import of the Centaur: Bacchantes with their hooves on the ground put heads pointed to the stars. Their leader Chiron, mentor to Achilles and expert apothecarian, was the son of Chronos, the god of time. The valences of the logo lined up perfectly: how better to represent a century in a bottle? And what the bottle? The house’s most iconic decanter was originally discovered in 1850, buried in the dirt at the site of the Battle of Jarnac – a religious civil war 300 years earlier.
Its fleur-de-lys ornamentation reflected the influence of the Italian Renaissance on King Louis XIII, and when Paul-Émile purchased the decanter, he knew it could only hold the greatest of his cognacs. One of the eaux-de-vie in the first blend of Louis XII produced 150 years ago came from one of the most auspicious years in the history of cognac production: 1811, the year of the comet. saw the Great Comet as a sign to invade Russia, but for Paul-Émile’s father it was a reminder to conserve the finest of vintages, to protect them and develop them for the next generation.
It’s a sentiment that runs through the heart of the Rémy Martin family business. Back in 1724, a young man named Rémy Martin, born into a family of winemakers, saw harvests crumble in the wake of the Great Frost. He decided to always keep back part of the vintage, to let it age.
Through two revolutions, the family continued to conserve, building their brand off the understanding the Grande Champagne cru was the first name in luxury, but never forgetting the importance of protecting their blends for their descendants. Centuries later, would be drinking Louis XIII in Versailles, and President Kennedy would sip his own glass at the Élysée after toasting to liberté, egalité, fraternité. More than just an after dinner indulgence, the pinnacle of Rémy Martin's cognac empire has been an instrument of international diplomacy for decades.
All this to say, when we drove up the gravel driveway to the family estate and saw one of the from the gardens at Versailles, we were walking into a piece of French history. Le Grollet has been in the ownership of the family since 1930. Before that, it was a royal .
The chairwoman was born in the mansion, and her family returns once a year to throw a party among the vineyards. Built in the of local Charentaise architecture, Le Grollet sits behind a courtyard, its walls made of the same chalk used in the arc de triomphe. Like the cognac they used to produce here – great wooden grape crushers, carved from entire tree trunks, sit, magisterial, in the cellar – the raw materials of this house are firmly rooted in the terroir.
A stone bridge, collapsed during the war, has become an archway to the manicured gardens. The roof tiles, our guide Alex says with a laugh, were moulded from the shape of local women’s thighs. I can’t quite tell if he’s joking, but it’s a romantic idea.
The frogs certainly seem to agree. As we sit down for a glass of Rémy Martin’s Telmont champagne (backed by one Leonardo DiCaprio for its sustainability credentials), it’s clear that we’ve interrupted some sort of Batrachoidal mating ceremony: their amorous croaks ring round Le Grollet like vuvuzelas. Leaving them to the business of their evening, we sit down for dinner in a candlelit barn among disused positsils, the clink of our Louis XIII glasses echoing around the rafters at a high G sharp.
The note produced when highly-trained burly Frenchmen roll 100 kilo burning hot barrels around a warehouse, on the other hand, is probably not in any earthly key. But at the Seguin Moreau cooperage, where they forge the barrels for Rémy Martin, the cacophony resounds. The tierçon casks for the House are only made of oak from the Limousin Forest, harvested during one week at the end of March when the conditions are perfect for the large grain and thinner staves.
Only two coopers have the traditional know-how to build these barrels: no nails, just fire and force. As oak planks, shaven down with saws and tied together like a hula skirt, toast over open fires, the Vulcan forge of a warehouse fills with the smell of baking bread. We were told countless more facts about how Rémy Martin crafts these barrels, but alas, the clang of hammers whacking curves of wood into shape meant I simply couldn’t hear any of them.
For 300 years, these kinds of local traditions have been at the heart of Rémy Martin’s cognac production: grapes working their way through soil flecked by local chalk, harvested using the knowledge of local families and grown in barrels of local oak. From the Grande Champagne , down the river Charente, and across continents. But as the world warms, the finely tuned natural rhythms of the Cognac microclimate are shifting, and the House that prides itself on heritage and history must keep a keen eye on the future.
But crafting a batch of Louis XIII has always been an act of divination, of communication with the generations before and after. Whether it's a new, hardier species of grape being granted the official Cognac appellation, or entire PhD’s dedicated to studying the biology of Magasin oak, the House has been adapting to the changing climate, investing in its future. In a partnership with John Malkovic, they produced .
Already recorded, produced, it’s ready to premier on 18 November, 2115. Those lucky enough to have been gifted a golden ticket to the gala screening next century will, much like a cellar master, have to entrust their treasure to someone younger, bequeath it to a descendant. The bulletproof safe containing the film reel is kept in Rémy Martin’s recently renovated historical house, where we eat our last lunch in France alongside Baptiste.
Keenly aware that I still have the smell of sweat and smoked oak from the cooperage lingering on my linens, I sit down with the owner of one the most sensitive noses in the world. Over espresso, we talk about how he grapples with a job that he will never live to see completed, one he began aged just 30. ‘With Louis XIII,’ says Baptiste, ‘I know I won’t see any of it, but I have the chance to follow their evolution throughout the ageing process.
For me it has never been a question, because I knew from the very beginning that it’s part of the mission.’ The ultimate expression of the values of Rémy Martin, and time, Baptiste grew up in Cognac and has dedicated his life to continuing the legacy of its most famous spirit, learning from his predecessors and readying the next generation for how the next centuries might change the cru. ‘Finally we are preparing the future,’ he concludes, ‘we are always playing with the past.
’ May Rémy Martin continue to do so, and may the King of Cognacs reign for another 150 years..
