Armagnac Delord: The Vintage Collection

This page is built around one thing: single year Bas Armagnac, bottled with the harvest year on the label rather than an age statement. The years in stock run from the 1950s through to the 2000s, which makes it one of the more useful pages on the site for anyone looking for a bottle from a particular year.

Delord is a family house at Lannepax in the Gers, founded in 1893 by Prosper Delord and still run by his descendants. Bas Armagnac is the western subregion of the Armagnac appellation, and its sandy soils are the reason its brandies are labelled separately from the rest.

Most vintages are bottled at forty per cent in 700ml, with smaller formats for some years: a 200ml Ariane and a 50ml. Around the vintages sit the blends and the outliers. The Fine is two to three years old, the XO 10 Year carries a minimum age rather than a year, and the XO Premium is drawn from stocks of twenty five to forty years. Blanche d'Armagnac is the unaged, colourless version, bottled at forty two per cent, and it is a different drink entirely, closer to a fruit driven grape spirit than to a brandy. The Epopee is a 130th anniversary bottling at forty three per cent, and there is a white Floc de Gascogne, the local fortified grape juice.

Not everything here is Delord. A short run of Comte de Lamaestre Bas Armagnac vintages shares the page, including a 2.5 litre format.

A vintage and an age statement are not the same promise, and our guide to buying a birth year bottle explains the difference before you commit to a year.

History

Armagnac is the older of the two great French grape brandies. Distilling was recorded in Gascony from the fourteenth century, several hundred years before the Charentes built its own trade, and for most of that time the spirit travelled by river and was sold locally rather than exported.

The region divides into three: Bas Armagnac in the west, Tenareze in the centre and Haut Armagnac in the east. The names describe geology rather than altitude, and the sandy soils of the Bas are the reason bottles carry the word.

Two things separate Armagnac from its neighbour. The first is the still. Armagnac is traditionally distilled once, in a continuous column still designed for the region, which leaves more of the wine's character in the spirit. The second is the habit of vintage bottling. A single year of Armagnac, aged in Gascon oak and bottled when the house judges it ready, is the regional signature, and it is why a bottle here can carry a year from the middle of the last century.

Delord belongs to that tradition. The house was founded in 1893 at Lannepax and has stayed in the same family since, and its vintage stocks are the reason a page like this can exist at all. A vintage bottling is not something a producer can decide to start doing: it requires casks laid down decades before anyone thought to sell them.

The appellation itself was formalised in 1936.

How to drink it

Neat, at room temperature, in a small tulip glass. A balloon snifter is the traditional shape and it is the wrong one: the wide bowl concentrates alcohol vapour and hides everything else. Do not warm it over a flame either. That is theatre and it burns off the aromatics.

Pour about 30ml and leave it for five minutes before you drink. Older Armagnac in particular needs air, and a fifty year old bottling will change noticeably in the glass over half an hour.

Drink it slowly and without water. These are bottled at forty to forty three per cent, which is already where the house wanted them, and unlike a cask strength whisky they do not need reduction.

Blanche d'Armagnac is the exception to all of the above. It is unaged and it works cold, from the fridge, before a meal rather than after one, and it makes a genuinely good base for a stirred cocktail.

The vintages reward comparison. Two years from the same house, tasted side by side in small measures, will tell you more about what a vintage means than any amount of reading. Keep the pours short if you are doing that.

An opened bottle holds for years if kept upright, out of sunlight and away from heat. Once it is below a quarter full it will fade over a year or so, so finish it rather than saving it.

More from this origin and style:

Darroze Armagnac Vintage Collection · Castarede Armagnac · Vintages