MAISON SURRENNE
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A cognac brand created in 1998 by Ansley Coale in collaboration with Richard Braastad of Cognac Tiffon (also now known as Cognac Braastad).
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Tiffon is the largest remaining family- owned cognac house, comprising four distilleries and eight aging cellars. The headquarters is the “Madame”, on the south bank of the Charente in Jarnac.
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Delivering cognac on wagons to the back of the Madame, ca. 1874
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Almost all commercial cognacs tend to be over- blended, obscuring the unique characteristics of its components. Tiffon holds an amazing amount of older aged cognacs, many as yet unblended. Coale & Braastad saw an opportunity to release small lots of unblended cognacs, or at least batches all from one harvest.
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The Borderies is alluvial soil deposited by the Charente river, which contains a lot of clay. Its cognacs, heavier, are almost exclusively used to add body to blends, despite their having lovely rich flavor: the land slopes mildly south and is open, so the grapes get lots of sun.
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But here’s the Distillerie Galtauld, an unblended Borderies some 13 years in barrel. It’s rich, deep, and smells slightly of violets, a Borderies characteristic.
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One of the treasures uncovered, this from the cellar of a vineyard farm house, was two small rattan-wrapped carboys (the French call them “bonbons’, pieces of candy) whose earliest records dated from 1875.
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Want unique? Here’s a grande champagne from one of Tiffon’s best vineyards, bottled unblended after aging since 1975.
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a staircase in the Madame
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One of the finest cognacs ever, a bottle of grande champagne distilled in 1946 by a Hubert Portier on his farmhouse still from grapes grown in his own vineyard: the first harvest after WWII. 76 years later, it still has wonderful deep fruit