Richard Hennessy—founder of the largest cognac firm on the planet—started his company way back in 1765. And yet, though the company saw remarkable success throughout the centuries, Hennessy sales skyrocketed as never before just this past decade. In the late 1990s, sales were growing 10 percent annually in the U.S., which is today the world’s largest cognac market. In part, the renewed taste for this particular brandy (as well as high-end wine, for that matter) was a function of the new refined palate among young people in this country, many of whom can now pronounce words like “cornichon” and “tagliatelle.”
And yet the oddest pocket of new cognac drinkers crystallized in the inner city starting in the eighties, where status-conscious gangsters began drinking it as a display of wealth, which translated to power on the street. “Black smack” or “C and C”—meaning cognac and cocaine—caught on as a favorite combo in tough neighborhoods in New York, Houston, Detroit, and L.A. Street boozers were guzzling so much cognac, Courvoisier marketed a bottle specifically designed to fit in a hip pocket.
One could only imagine the original Richard Hennessy—founder of the Hennessy firm, clad in his eighteenth-century frock coat, tights, and frilly cravat—chatting about his liquor on a street corner with Tupac Shakur, who, before he was gunned down in 1996 in Las Vegas, became a walking Hennessy advertisement.
“Fuck friends, ’cause when in danger those niggas change,” Tupac would chant.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Puff weed, and stuff G’s in my sock, G! Call Ki’s and Hennessy where tha Glock be!”
Then Tupac would yank a flask from his pocket.
“I’d love a tipple,” Richard Hennessy would say, scratching his white wig nervously.
Alas, the two were never destined to meet. They were separated by a couple centuries’ worth of brandy drinkers. But both lived remarkable lives, with great ambition fueled by fine cognac, among other things. Like Tupac’s, Richard Hennessy’s life was full of everything that makes for a fascinating profile: liquor, money, power, violence, and more liquor. Though his life story is hardly as intoxicating as the brandy he made, the two go pretty well together, if you get the point.
The first thing you should know about Richard Hennessy: he was an Irishman of English descent. Now this is remarkable, given the fact that he made his riches by producing French liquor in France and selling most of it at great profit outside of France.
You’ll remember that, for centuries up until recently, and to some degree still today, the English and the French have hated each other. The French, who can be notably jingoistic about the finer points of their culture, take great pride in their cognac, which is regarded by many liquor experts to be the finest spirit ever distilled. And the English? “Up your ass, you bastard” is a common London phrase used in regard to England’s neighboring foe. The Brits are quick to point out that, according to recent studies, 40 percent of Frenchmen don’t change their underwear every day. But if a Brit really wants to take the piss out of a Frenchman, he can always fall back on France’s troubling cognac enigma.
If one were to honor Great Britain’s greatest conqueror of France, it might just be Captain Richard Hennessy, a soldier of fortune who sailed with the Irish Brigade as a young man, only to end up one of the greatest liquor barons in French history. Don’t misunderstand: he was well loved in France, even when that nation was at war with his own. This was all part of his mastery.
Hennessy landed in France by happenstance. When he was barely twenty, this son of a lord sailed from his home in County Cork in Ireland to serve as a military captain for France’s Henry XV for a good wage. Hennessy fought in Fontenoy in 1745, where he was wounded; in Flanders in forty-six; in Cherbourg in forty-eight. He’d fight anyone, as long as there was a paycheck waiting.
Hennessy ended up garrisoned on the French island Île de Re, where he fell in love with the country’s spectacular Atlantic coast. There, numerous rivers dump into the ocean, and the marshy coast is speckled with medieval villages hugging the sea. Just north of Bordeaux, the river Charente greets the Atlantic. Up the Charente a short distance, Hennessy found a small town, population five thousand people, called Cognac.
By this time, Cognac already had a reputation for its eaux-de-vie(“water of life”). Now get this straight right off, lest you get kicked out of your local cigar bar: all cognac is brandy, but not all brandy is cognac. Only brandy made in Cognac can be called cognac (just like sparkling wine made anywhere but Champagne is not champagne, but “sparkling wine”). Brandy is, quite simply, wine distilled into liquor, and it was almost certainly the first liquor ever made. (Today, most manufacturers add caramel for color and a dash of sugar to mellow the flavor.) The Dutch were the first to form a taste for it. They called the libation brandywijn—literally “burned wine”—and thus the name brandy. To make the stuff, they imported wine from France for distilling. By Hennessy’s time, the French had started making brandy themselves. They could clear a bigger profit that way. Instead of shipping hundreds of casks of wine, they could distill it themselves into a higher proof beverage, making it easier to ship in smaller, more concentrated quantities. For this reason, they made the brandy fairly strong—up to 70 percent alcohol (today, by law, it cannot exceed 45 percent). Drinkers then diluted it with water. Or not.
Richard Hennessy was thirty-six when he set up shop. Originally, he stopped in Bordeaux, but he quickly moved to Cognac because, as he said, “it was the only town in the province with a market dealing in brandy.” Of all the towns in France, or anywhere for that matter, Cognac had everything a guy could need to create a perfect liquor from grapes. Porous soil rich in chalk. A seasonal climate with plenty of rain and sun. “No other region can produce cognac,” wrote the eminent French historian Professor Louis Ravaz in 1900. “The slightest difference in the climate, the soil, and so on is enough to change completely the nature of the brandy.” In addition, the river Charente that split the town had a bottom deep enough for large boats and provided a clear path to the Atlantic, perfect for shipping. (The Cognacais had been exporting salt for years before they discovered the art of distilling.)
Hennessy began exporting cognac just for fun. And he wanted his friends in Ireland and England to have a taste. In this ultraquaint rustic village, he made his home among the tiny cobblestone streets and sixteenth-century chateaux. Some of the cognac names familiar to today’s drinkers were already hawking liquor at the time, Delamain and Martell in particular. Like them, Hennessy began buying brandies from the local grape growers, who were distilling the stuff themselves, and blending them for a complex and long-lasting flavor.
It was already common knowledge that the longer the brandy aged in wood casks, the finer and mellower the flavor. From the still, the so-called burned wine resembled grappa; it was clear and fiery. To give it its flavor and color, one needed to age it in casks, in a cellar where it was cool and protected from the sun’s rays. Hennessy searched for ten years before finding the perfect spot for his Founder’s Cellar, on the right bank of the river Charente. There he blended the brandies he bought from vintners throughout the region and aged them in oak barrels, the so-called “sleeping beauties,” as one contemporary called the casks. (Visitors to Cognac today can tour this very same cellar, home of the most famous collection of brandies in the world, where casks as old as the U.S. Constitution lie waiting to be tapped.)
Hennessy was aging most cognacs for no more than a year, though some as long as four years. Price was set by age as well as the precise geographic region in Cognac where the grapes were grown. (Some are considered better than others.) When the liquor had matured, it was sold in anonymous casks, which were then bottled and labeled by the importing companies in those particular cities where they were to be drunk. In other words, the average consumer didn’t have any idea who Richard Hennessy was. Just as well. The growing clientele he enjoyed was drinking the liquor in part because of its French mystique. If the French are experts at anything, it is food and drink. But Hennessy wasn’t French at all.
Oddly enough, the people of Cognac didn’t drink a lot of their native liquor. In Richard Hennessy’s time, most of the brandy made in the region was exported to England, Holland, Ireland, and Denmark. Actually, Hennessy thought it would be vulgar to sell his liquor to the locals. He preferred to sell it abroad.
At first, as Richard’s grandson Auguste later noted, “The fact is that the public originally took to drinking brandy and water for medicinal reasons, and having found it both pleasant and effective, they are likely to continue.” During the 1770s, the café society of London developed a taste for luxe libations including sherry, port, and “coniack brandy.” French liquor became a symbol of decadence and wealth, the same way it would centuries later for street thugs like Tupac and Snoop Dogg.
Being an Irishman of English blood and the son of a lord to boot,
MAKING THE GRADE
Those weird acronyms on cognac labels? They actually mean something. Back in 1865, when Maurice Hennessy (Richard Hennessy’s grandson) started bottling cognac, he created a classification system to help drinkers know what they were getting into. The system was eventually picked up by other brands, so it’s now industry-wide. Here’s how it works:
VS: Very Superior (also known as Three Star). The VS is a blend of brandies, the youngest of which is at least 2.5 years old. If you’re into mixing your cognac cocktail-style—say, a brandy and ginger ale—this is the stuff.
Hennessy had great connections among London importers. He was also an experienced sea captain, so he had a leg up in the shipping business. Within a few years, Hennessy was the largest cognac merchant in the world, rivaling Martell, a close second. The two emerged as a duopoly, locked in a spirited competition that basically controlled the market. All was well. And drunk.
Then came the French Revolution. One would think that a rich foreigner running a lucrative business would have a tough time keeping his head on straight when the poor masses rebelled and guillotined France’s King Louis XVI and any other rich folk they could get their hands on. Au contraire. While many of the cognac merchants suffered during the Revolution, Richard Hennessy made out splendidly. Though quite rich, he was not considered bourgeois. As an Irish refugee from British yoke, Richard was celebrated as Citizen Hennessy, a man of the people. Though it’s tough to prove today, it seems likely that Hennessy profited by selling his liquor to the revolutionaries.
At the end of the eighteenth century, business was continuing to grow. During the French-English wars, Hennessy wisely shipped his cargo to London through neutral ports. As French and English citizens murdered each other in droves, the brandy merchant continued selling his cognac from France to the Brits, keeping his highbrow clientele numb and happy. He also made the first sale of cognac to America in 1794, to one Jacob Schieffelin, who ran a small apothecary shop on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan. (Schieffelin’s descendants have represented Hennessy cognac in this country ever since; today, Moët-Hennessy–Louis Vuitton and Diageo jointly own the highly regarded importing company Schieffelin & Somerset, which is based in New York.)
As the eighteenth century came to a close, the region of Cognac was pumping out nearly two million gallons of brandy annually. It came to be a topic of discussion, this delicious liquor. Thus the famous quote from the French politician Talleyrand, a contemporary of Richard Hennessy’s, on how to drink the stuff: “You take your glass in the hollow of your hand, you warm it, you rotate it with a circular movement so that the spirit gives off its aroma. Then you carry it to your nostrils and inhale . . . and then, my dear sir, you put down your glass and talk about it.”
Cognac’s reputation was made.
Richard Hennessy died in 1800, at the age of eighty. But there were other Hennessys to come, men who would carry on the tradition of making stellar brandy all the way to the present day: James Sr., James Jr., Auguste, two Maurices, and a Gilles. (Of course, there had to be a Gilles.)
There were a few rough spots over the years. An outbreak of phylloxera nearly destroyed the entire industry at the end of the nineteenth century. Cognac supplies plummeted, sending prices through the roof, so only the wealthy could afford it. This reinforced the drink’s wealthy fan base, which it still enjoys today. Cognac producers also battled fraud, as shady moonshiners all over Europe began distilling rotgut and selling it as “cognac” starting in the 1850s. In response, France enacted a trademark law. Brandy companies began registering labels and bottling their liquor with their own name on it (as opposed to selling the anonymous casks to importers, who put their labels on it).
TOP SHELF HENNESSY
In addition to VS, VSOP, and XO, Hennessy offers a few noteworthy bottles, not for the faint of heart (or wallet).
Today, the choices of cognacs available run the gamut—from the cheap stuff, which is great for mixing (with, say, 7 Up), to $3000 bottles, which literally took a century to create. If you’re a guy who could afford a bottle of the latter—a guy like Tupac Shakur, for example—the lesson is clear: drink with pleasure and watch your back. There will always be some thirsty thug lurking in the shadows.