Francois Voyer

Francois Voyer works in Grande Champagne, and the range is unusually complete for a house of its size. You can follow one style from the entry point right through to bottlings several decades old without leaving the cru.

VS is the starting point and an honest one. Terre de Grande Champagne at around five years is where the chalk character starts to show, and Napoleon at fifteen years is the range's quiet workhorse.

At the top sit XO Gold at twenty to thirty years, the GC XO carafe, and Cristal at thirty to forty. A cask strength Lot 93 sits outside the main line for anyone who wants it undiluted.

The house also makes Pineau des Charentes, in white and red. It is grape juice fortified with young cognac, and it belongs before dinner rather than after.

One note worth having: two of the Pineau bottlings are currently filed under the wrong product type in our catalogue, so if you are browsing by category you may not find them where you expect. They are on this page regardless.

History

Cognac is defined by six concentric crus radiating out from the town of Segonzac, and Grande Champagne is the innermost. The name has nothing to do with sparkling wine: champagne here derives from the Latin for open country, and the shared root is the chalk that sits under both regions.

That chalk is why Grande Champagne matters. It is soft, porous and deep, and it feeds the vine water slowly through the summer. The resulting wine is low in alcohol and high in acid, which distils into a spirit that is delicate when young and extraordinarily persistent when old. It is also slow, which is why houses here talk in decades rather than years.

Pineau des Charentes is the region's other product and its origin story is an accident. Sometime in the sixteenth century a grower is said to have poured grape must into a barrel that still held cognac, discovered his mistake years later, and found the result rather good. It has been made deliberately ever since and now carries its own appellation.

For the neighbouring region, see Armagnac, or browse the full cognac range.

How to drink it

Use a tulip glass rather than a balloon. The classic wide snifter was designed to be cradled and warmed, and both of those things hurt the drink: heat pushes alcohol up the nose and buries the fruit.

Serve at room temperature and leave the flame well away from it.

The VS and Terre de Grande Champagne are mixing cognacs and should be treated as such without apology. A Sidecar, a Horse's Neck, or simply cognac over ice with tonic and a slice of lemon are all good uses. From Napoleon upward, drink it neat.

Give an older cognac time in the glass. Ten to fifteen minutes changes XO Gold and Cristal considerably, and the savoury rancio note that marks very old Grande Champagne only emerges once the alcohol has blown off a little.

Pineau des Charentes is different again and gets treated like a fortified wine, not a spirit. Serve it properly chilled, around eight to ten degrees, as an aperitif with charcuterie, melon or foie gras. The white suits seafood and the red suits cheese and chocolate. Once opened, keep it in the fridge and finish it within a couple of months.

More in French aperitifs.