Tales From The Cognac - Short Stories Of The Four Great Houses

ILLUSTRATED BY ZACH CUNNINGHAM

Isaac Marion wrote "The aged cognac tastes like history. Not the kind taught in schools, full of wars and politics and cultural revolution - the smaller, softer history of a world with only two people in it." In 1979, two years before Marion was even born, Martin Sheen downed a bottle of Martell Cognac Cordon Bleu like a boss in Apocalypse Now.

In case you weren't aware, Cognac is a brandy from the Cognac appellation of France, made up of the departments of Charente and Charente-Maritime and surrounding the town of Cognac, just north of Bordeaux. And Marion was right. There is something about an aged Cognac that tastes like history, other than the obvious fact that it's been aged. Is it the grapes? The land? The oak? Tradition? History itself? Or all of the above?

I don't know the answer but I can't blame Sheen for devouring that bottle. So it's probably a good thing that this article isn't about the cognac spirit. This is about moments in history. Four great stories of the four great houses of Cognac. The ones that blazed the trail, the innovators that turned their ways into tradition, the successful houses that made cognac what it is today and continue to be the big boys on the block.

Martell, Rémy Martin, Hennessy and Courvoisier.

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