Elite Traveler Spring 2020

INSPIRE HERITAGE

What goes into a $3,800 bottle of Louis XIII? Kristen Shirley heads to its estates in the idyllic French countryside to discover the mysteries behind the world’s oldest and most exclusive cognac A STEP BACK IN TIME

century, so the wood itself is an integral part of the cognac. “When you have wood that has such a long history and has seen so many different eaux-de-vie, it totally encapsulates all of these eaux-de-vie, because of course the wood has liquid inside. So by all of these rotations of eaux-de-vie and all of the Grande Champagne eaux-de-vie that have been stored in these tierçons, it is part of the history of Louis XIII, and of course, it will be part of the future,” Loiseau says. In the 1960s, then-cellar master André Giraud noticed some of the tierçons were leaking because of damage caused by stacking them. The only way to repair a tierçon is to cannibalize another, to ensure that the wood is the same age and has the same seasoning. Loiseau says: “We have to store these tierçons one by one because they are fragile, because they are more than one century old, not to destroy them. We are limited to the tierçons we have in the cellar, and it’s really impossible to find other old tierçons at a cooperage or in a winegrower’s estate. The only way to repair a tierçon that is leaking is to sacrifice another one. So little by little, we were destroying the potential of the tierçons we had in the cellar.” In 2013, he realized that the house would eventually run out, and he needed to act to revive the lost art of the tierçon. He needed “to ensure that for the next generation, they will have the rawmaterials to keep Louis XIII consistent,” he says. The project took four years to develop, and required the help of an archivist historian, the French National Forests Office, a 180-year old cooperage and Louis XIII’s own master coopers. France has a notion of patrimoine , which translates to patrimony, but means so much more. The French are fiercely proud of their culture, their gastronomy, their wine, their haute couture. They cherish the heritage and craftsmanship behind these métiers d’art. They search for excellence, and if something is more expensive and time-consuming and it only makes something a tiny bit better, they still will, without question, do it. There is no cost too great or art too arcane. For me, the project of the tierçon speaks to this sense of pride, this patrimoine . Oak seems so simple, so plain, so generic, until I stand beneath towering trees in a Limousin forest. Anthony Auffret, a director in the National Forests Office, explains the patrimoine behind cultivating a forest like this. He references notes from dozens of past forest managers —who described the ecology, their practices for maintaining the forest, how to decide which trees to keep and which to cut — and he does the same to help preserve the forest’s future. Auffret explains what he looks for in trees, pointing out that something like a small

Deep in the heart of Cognac, France, lies a place where time is not measured in weeks, months or even years, but in decades and centuries. Where a cellar master blends eaux-de-vie that have been aging for 70 years in casks that are over 100 years old, and plans each of his steps imagining what his successor’s successor’s successor might need in another 100 years. At the house of Louis XIII, time rules everything. Walking into one of the cellars where its precious eaux-de-vie age, I am instantly struck by the humidity, the eerie stillness, the majesty of the towering, cobweb-covered casks and the overpowering smell of alcohol. A cellar might be the only place in France where no one would dream of smoking; you can’t even use the flash on your camera for fear of a spark in the air. Here, among hundreds of casks, cellar master Baptiste Loiseau begins to speak about time. He looks at the tierçons and barriques as he speaks in a reverent tone about the house’s origins in 1874, his predecessors, his legacy, the precious liquid aging in ancient oak and how he is ensuring that he provides the next generation with the raw materials needed to create this special cognac. It is not as simple as aging eaux-de-vie every year. The warming climate has changed the levels of acidity and sugar in the grapes, so he started a 20-year project growing different varietals to see which might produce enough acidity for cognac in the future. The oak trees need nearly 180 years to grow large enough to create a tierçon, and they need another half-century filled with eaux-de-vie to have the right level of seasoning to hold the final blend of Louis XIII. And that’s not even mentioning the thousands of barrels of eaux-de-vie aging in dozens of cellars dotted around the countryside, each needing attention, tasting, rotation and blending. The oldest eaux-de-vie in a bottle of Louis XIII are decades old, which are practically children when compared to the age of the tierçons. Tierçons are odd things. They are larger than a traditional 350-liter barrique; they are longer, the wood staves are thinner, they are far more fragile and they are far older: The last one made for Louis XIII was in 1917, duringWorldWar I. After that, the craft was lost as cooperages became more industrialized and created standard sizes, and something as finicky as a tierçon became a relic of a past era. Why use a tierçon at all if they are so fragile? It is that fragility, the thinness of the wood — .6 inches instead of 1 inch — that changes the angel’s share and what Loiseau calls “the evolution of the aroma.” The tierçons at Louis XIII have aged and absorbed eaux-de-vie for over a

Photos Rémy Martin, Stéphane Charbeau