Will 2025 (Finally) Be Brandy's Year?
I remain optimistic, but we need to start drinking and talking about smaller brands. Including my artisan picks for Cognac, Armagnac, and Calvados for your holiday splurge.
“I think that Cognac in the U.S. is in a dire spot.” That’s from a recent LinkedIn post by Nicolas Palazzi, the founder of PM Spirits. Given that PM Spirits imports one of the finest French brandy portfolios in the U.S., this feels rather alarming to Cognac fans, like me. Palazzi elucidated his reasons:
- there are very little Cognac-based cocktails on drink menu and even less people ordering them when they exist.
- the neat Cognac drinker seems extinct
- the market for non-mega-brands is made of a very limited amount of enthusiasts, most of which coming from a whiskey background.
“In a word, Cognac has lost its cool factor,” Palazzi continued. “Sure Cognac still retains a strong image, but it has grown disconnected from who the drinker is and what she is looking for. Is there a future for a ‘Cognac category’ in the U.S.? Maybe, but it will be extremely hard to get messages to sound relatable to the potential consumer.”
Palazzi says that Cognac, in 2024, reminds him of Bordeaux in the 2010s. He writes:
What was referred to as the ‘Bordeaux market’ was a lot less solid than one thought. Those top estates had true brand power but the rest of the appellation had lost its allure. Turns out Cheval had been selling ‘Cheval,’ not ‘Bordeaux.’ 15 years later, Bordeaux as an appellation has lost its appeal but a few cool winemakers who make good wines & happen to be located in the region have developed a following.
It’s hard not to see the parallel. Cognac has long been dominated by the Big Four of Hennessy, Martell, Rémy Martin, and Courvoisier. Those companies always sell their own brand over Cognac as a region. I wrote about this after watching Rémy Martin’s Super Bowl ad in 2023:
What does any of this have to do with Cognac, or spirits, or drinking? Who knows? By this stage of late capitalism we all know how branding works. It’s always great for a brand to have someone so widely admired as Serena sitting at a bar ordering its liquid on the rocks. But here’s the thing. Do many people who watched that ad, or see the bottles of V.S.O.P. and 1738, or hear the name Rémy Martin…even know that it’s Cognac? If they do, do they even know what Cognac is?
Cognac is very complicated. It’s a region of thousands of growers and producers, but it’s controlled by four brands…In the U.S., these so-called Big Four sell about 90 percent of the Cognac consumed, with Hennessy alone accounting for 60 percent. The majority of those sales are of one product: Hennessy VS. Prices, aging, and pretty much any other rule about what’s allowed and what’s not is effectively set by these Big Four. They wield their power…
For instance, the Big Four rarely explain to consumers what Cognac, or even brandy, actually is. Just ask a random person to tell you the basic difference between brandy and whiskey. Or ask someone to tell you what Rémy Martin is. Unless everyone you know is a spirits nerd, I bet at least 8 out of 10 people cannot. Even if they are regular drinkers of Hennessy or Rémy Martin they might not even know. If you watch its Super Bowl ad, Rémy Martin’s liquid is simply a brown spirit consumed on the rocks—an alternative to Crown Royal, or Jameson, or whatever other big-brand brown spirit.
For me, and many others, it was no surprise that Rémy Martin announced its U.S. sales had plunged 43% in just the first half of 2023—which I wrote about in Wine Enthusiast. A year later, little has changed.
So what’s the answer for Cognac, and for brandy in general? Well, the answer I’ve been giving for several years now is: Focus on the handful of artisan brands doing things the right way. In fact, Cognac would do well to borrow the model of what’s happening in cousin regions Armagnac and Calvados, where a number of smaller producers are focused on single-casks and special bottlings as their introduction to American spirits aficionados.
Which is what I am recommending below in my annual brandy roundup, with my latest faves among single-barrel selections, as well as nine picks that are $100 and under (and relatively easy to find) for brandy newbies. I’m also making a case for two smaller Cognac negociants to be more widely available in the U.S. market.