Sipping on ‘yak’…

My kit for blokeish heaven*

Although cocktails based on Cognac are among the oldest created, it’s no surprise that major brandy players are keen to get hip to the “Second Golden Age of the Cocktail” (which we’re in, if you hadn’t noticed) and persuade the young and cool that Cognac is for hipsters, not just for septuagenarians in gentleman’s clubs.

This time last year Courvoisier created their multi-room, immersive “Institute of Grand Cocktails Experience”, where each room was meant to be “like stepping inside a cocktail”. Their Courvoisier Exclusif expression was actually developed as a cocktail ingredient, and in London Cocktail Week 2010 they sponsored a seminar on that most ancient of mixed drinks, punch.

Now Rémy Martin have taken a more blokeish approach and are sponsoring the GQ Men of the Year Awards ceremony on 3rd September, which will include the special Rémy Martin Breakthrough Award for newcomers. Rémy cocktails will be served through the ceremony and afterwards the brand will be running a bespoke bar at the after-party on the Royal Opera House balcony.

Rémy’s mixologists apparently kept coming back to a signature combination of Cognac and ginger, so the house cocktail will be the R&G, Rémy and ginger ale. The sample kit I was sent included a bottle of Fevertree ginger ale, so that is clearly the preferred brand.

An R&G cocktail

R&G
50ml Rémy Martin VSOP
Ginger ale top
Lemon peel garnish
Build over ice and garnish with a lemon twist

With that twist it reminds me of the classic Horse’s Neck cocktail, which was in essence a soft drink of ginger ale with a long spiral strip of lemon peel—just like in the R&G photo—and bitters; but from its inception it has been regularly spiked, sometimes with bourbon but originally with Cognac. I’m sipping an R&G now and I can confirm that it is a good combination. The Rémy has aromas of oranges, bananas, almonds and hazelnuts and an underlying warmth that is indeed like ginger.

On Rémy’s website you’ll find a host more recommended cocktails—five of which contain ginger. Moreover, they have created a special drink just for the GQ awards, called, naturally the R&GQ. It likewise involves ginger but also, in a stroke of blokeish genius, contains beer!**

The manly R&GQ cocktail

R&GQ
35ml Rémy Martin VSOP
20ml Lemon juice
15ml Bottle Green Ginger and Lemongrass cordial
Very cold British ale
Build in a chilled half-pint glass tankard

Since they are not too specific about the ale, I figure that a Pale Ale style would be best, as these are often intended to be served cold, or at least cool (I plump for St Austell Cornish Pale Ale). I’ve never tried making a cocktail with beer before, and it is quite a revelation: for a start you can taste everything, the ale with its bitter hoppy finish, the sour lemon juice, the warm date-like Cognac and the fiery ginger (the lemongrass perhaps getting slightly subsumed into the lemon juice). It retains the quaffability of beer, but with a complexity and the typical sweet-‘n’-sour extremities of many cocktails. It feels a bit like drinking an 18th-century drink, like spiced, mulled ale (although it is cold) or punch. Fascinating. I’m definitely a convert.

The Rémy Martin Cognac house itself goes back to 1724. The spirit is distilled from grapes, mostly Ugni Blanc, grown exclusively in the Grande Champagne and Petit Champagne regions of Cognac. Barrel ageing is an important part of the Cognac process, and the spirit in the VSOP*** is a blend of batches between four and 14 years old, all aged in barrels of French Limousin oak.

The version I have here is the VSOP Mature Cask Finish: after the final blend of aged spirits is made, the mixture is rested for a further year in small oak casks, all more than 20 years old. Apparently this extra time in small casks (with a proportionally greater surface area) increases the gentle exposure of the brandy to the air, through the permeable wood, while presumably getting relatively little of the heavy vanilla character of fresh oak. This is said to increase the peach and apricot notes. I get the impression that this last stage is a relatively new development.

Sampling the Rémy neat, I get wafts of berries and the afore-mentioned stone fruit, plus vanilla from the oak and something sweetly floral like rose. It’s quite a complex nose, with unexpected things in the mix like ashtrays and sticking plasters too. Bring it up to your lips and the apricot nose intensifies. These flavours continue on to the palate, with little sparks of other things, like tobacco and figs, and on to a relatively smooth, warm finish.

I put the Rémy head-to-head with some of Sainsbury’s own VSOP Cognac that I happen to have, on the grounds that they are both VSOPs, though the Sainbury’s brandy is £21.50 a bottle and the Rémy is about £34. The Sainsbury’s has a big, soupy nose with a host of flavours, including raisins, dates, chocolate and copper, jostling with each other. It’s bold but a little chaotic. The Rémy, by comparison, has more refinement, poise and clarity. On the palate the Sainsbury’s is about as smooth as the Rémy, with some latent Christmas cake flavours, but a bit flabby and unresolved.

Rémy on the rocks, anyone?

My Rémy Martin Man Kit comes with a handsome highball glass, a sturdy bar spoon and, interestingly, a little ice bucket just the right size for a 35cl half bottle. (I later discover from the PR that it is actually intended for chilling the ginger ale!) Now purists will be perplexed and outraged at the idea of serving Cognac chilled, but a few years ago Cognac became the drink choice for hippety-hop hipsters in the clubz, presumably because of its traditional association with opulence and wealth, and I wonder if the preferred presentation in this environment became to serve it on ice. In any case, it reminds me of a conversation I had with a Rémy rep after a Cognac and cigar evening some years ago, when he talked about arranging a tasting to match Rémy VSOP and XO with various sweet and savoury foods—in some of these pairings the Cognac was served on the rocks, or even from the freezer. So clearly chilled Cognac is not just a nouveau riche affectation but something with the aesthetic endorsement of Rémy themselves.

Some other classic Cognac cocktails you might like to try include the Sidecar (Cognac, Cointreau and lemon juice), the Champagne Cocktail (Champagne, Cognac, bitters and a sugar cube), and, if you must, the Earthquake (equal parts Cognac and absinthe). Or for something a little more obscure but surprisingly effective, try the Ritz, which I believe may have been invented by Dale DeGroff:

Ritz Cocktail
¾ shot Rémy Martin
½ shot Cointreau
½ shot maraschino
½ shot lemon juice
Champagne/sparkling wine top
Orange peel garnish
Shake the first four ingredients with ice and strain into a coupe glass. Top with Champagne or sparkling wine and garnish with a squeezed strip of orange peel.

* This issue of GQ comes with five different (and doubtless highly collectible) covers, featuring the different members of One Direction, outlining how “heavier…rockier…cooler” One Direction's New Direction is. I hear that 1D's army of female teen fans have been so incensed by some of the less than hagiographical things that the GQ journalists say about the band that a barrage of death threats has been launched against the magazine's staff. That's how edgy a GQ bloke's life is.

** In fairness it has been trendy to make cocktails with beer for some time. I'm sure it gives the mixologist the chance to specify obscure craft ales and boutique porters…

*** Stands for Very Special Old Pale or Very Superior Old Pale. The categorisation requires that everything in the blend must be at least four years old, though as in this case, the average age will usually be higher than this.

Brandy and Cigars: A Match Made in Heaven?

Alexandre with the XO. He is very French

It’s the end of your fantasy evening and for what do you bellow? Brandy and cigars, of course.

Imagine how my curiosity was piqued when I was invited along to a cigar-and-brandy event last night at the Stafford Hotel in St James’s. The cigars were Cohiba Siglo VI courtesy of Hunters and Frankau and the Cognac was Remy Martin VSOP and XO. These brandy categories indicate age, but not anything terribly specific: the cognacs are blends of spirits of different ages. “VSOP” requires a minimum of four years (in practice the Rémy VSOP consists of eaux de vie aged between four and 14 years) and XO six years (though from 2016 this will rise to ten).

These acronyms actually mean nothing in French—they stand for English phrases “Very Special/Superior Old Pale” and “Extra Old”, reflecting the dominance of the English market at the time they were devised. Rémy does actually produce a VS product too, we are told by Alexandre Quintin, the Rémy ambassador (who is very French and even looks like a character from Belleville Rendezvous). It’s a grade below VSOP, but is sold only in America. Make of this what you will, but it’s interesting to note that while the US is now an important market for cognac, the demographic has shifted dramatically from affluent white drinkers to urban black consumers, who now represent 60–80 per cent of sales. In studies many purchasers have confirmed that their choice of drink is specifically an endorsement of their favourite rap artist. Do not underestimate the power of hippety-hop.

Rémy are very proud of the high proportion of grapes from Grande Champagne and Petite Champagne, the two more prestigious crus for cognac. A blend of the two, with at least 50 per cent Grande Champagne, is known as Fine Champagne and 80 per cent of all of this is made by Rémy. In fact their VSOP is 55 per cent Grande and the XO 85 per cent.

The Stafford event was originally scheduled to take place in the vaulted wine cellars, where I hung around twiddling my thumbs before discovering that it had moved to the courtyard. (I’m glad I saw the cellars, though, as they are a shrine to their WWII function as bunkers, filled not just with dusty wine bottles but old signs, helmets and other mementoes; perhaps worthy of further investigation.) Needless to say the weather whipped up and the heavens opened, leaving us huddled under canvas canopies. Hurricane conditions aren’t ideal for appreciating the subtleties of a stogie—the boxes of long cigar matches liberally scattered were of little use and I relied on the generous loan of a multi-jet turbo gas lighter (imagine lighting your smoke with a pocket-sized Death Star) from a fellow guest. Initially they plied us with Prosecco, which I thought was a surprisingly delicate flavour to risk against the leathery Old-World fumes of the cigars, but perhaps not—I was reliably informed by the Hunters and Frankau rep that certain cigars go very well with Champagne. Don’t believe me? I might arrange a Club event to investigate this assertion once and for all…

The story goes that an exceptional cigar roller, Eduardo Rivera, devised a particular long thin cigar for the private used of himself, family and friends. One of those friends was Bienvenido Perez, who happened to be Fidel Castro’s bodyguard. One day Castro was out of smokes and asked his minder to sub him. He enjoyed Rivera’s cigar so much he set the man up up with a team of five to produce them for the president’s exclusive use. (The name Cohiba came from the ancient Taino Indian word for the bunches of tobacco leaves that Columbus saw the original Cubans smoking.) Indeed it was not until 1982 that a range of Cohibas became available to the public; ten years after that the Linea 1492 range was added to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World, in five gauges dubbed Siglo (“century”) I to V. The relatively fat (a 52 in cigar gauges) Siglo VI, which we were smoking, didn’t arrive until 2003. Two of the filler leaves in Cohiba cigars undergo a tertiary fermentation in cedar barrels to impart smoothness. Apparently the Cohiba flavour is most often described as “grassy”, though I’m not sure I picked up on that. 

OK, cigar aside, what was the brandy like? I  must have tasted at least the VSOP before but coming to it fresh I was hit by an unexpectedly pronounced apple note. In fact if you’d given it to me blind and asked me what it was I might even have suggested that it was Calvados (Normandy’s apple brandy). After that, as you get your snout deeper in and then sample the palate, I got broader, spicier notes, but still all very lively and pugnacious. It may be an old world drink but it was still bouncing around on its toes. (The Rémy website claims you should be getting “the impertinence of wild flowers”. Don’t you just know that’s been translated from French?)

I then switched to the XO and immediately got a softer, wider, preserved-fruit barrage. Alexandre likened the flavours to Christmas pudding—it was figs and plums, very characterful but more like subtle woody memories, in which you want to wallow nostalgically, than the darting VSOP. 

I’m no connoisseur of cigars but I have enjoyed a few and I was interested to see if it was true that they could be meaningfully partnered with drink. Just because they are commonly associated doesn’t mean it works: after all, Champagne and chocolate are often sold together, yet make a foul gustatory combination. However, it won’t surprise you to hear that Cognac and cigars to do work. Just like a food and drink combination, the flavours of each emphasise aspects of the other. The sweetness of the brandy seemed to be brought out, a sugar cane quality that perhaps filtered any bitterness in the smoke, leaving smooth, rubbery, Reisling-like, petrol notes and aromatic woody hints. The two jostled and occasionally sparked: at one point I got a burst of mixed, candied fruit peel (back to Christmas pudding again, I suppose).

Hunters organise regular events of this kind but you’ll have to keep looking at their website: they are not allowed to do mail-outs, as this constitutes advertising. Rémy meanwhile are organising a “speakeasy” themed night next week, with Champagne reception, three-course meal and lashings of Cognac and cigars (is that really what speakeasies were like? I’m thinking more bathtub gin and raucous jazz). But this will set you back £140. In fact my evening was very much one of sampling the high life—while Rémy Martin VSOP is typically around £30, the XO closer to £90. Cohiba Siglo VI are around £22–25 singly.

So what other flavour combinations are there out there we should investigate? Chablis and chewing tobacco? Champagne and chewing gum? The Institute is at your service. Mind the monkey on the way out. He was testing our homemade puffer fish bitters last night and I think he’s still sleeping it off…