How much you know about what you poured into your mouth? Part 2.1 – Brandy
Brandy, rather classy name to most of us, most of all, a drink that come along with hefty price tag in any pubs or your favorite hangout place. However, choices in our region are really limited for this spirit, usually around 1 and not more than 3 choices in any pub or cafe. Everywhere you go, Martell, Hennessy, Remy Martin, Courvoisier (the big four), Camus & Otard. How often you will get all these 6 brands under the same roof?
Brandy is just a general term, in fact, too general that spirits that made of grape residues, apples, pears or even berries can also be refer as brandy and known differently in the region they are from. There are 2 approaches you can go into:
First, the region or nation producing it. For example, all the brandies that made their way successfully to our region are better refer as COGNAC, a region in France that produce arguably the best brandy in the world, (yes, we are so lucky). Another region will be Armagnac, following closely behind. The brand of Armagnac to lookout for is Chabot, if you are interested to try one. Besides the French, we also have brandies from the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, German and even South African, basically any nation that produce wine, or grape wine to be precise, brandy is just a “distillation” away.
Second, the source. Brandy can be distilled from a wide variety of fruits or even pomace (grape/fruits residues). Fruits ranging from apples, pears, apricots, cherries, berries, yes, berries… but I am not going into this, not like we are able to get those in our favorite groceries store. However, you might be able to get apple brandy if you are lucky enough; the brand is Laird’s Applejack from America or Calvados, apple brandy from France.
As for pomace brandies, considered to be a rather lowbrow little spirit for rustic folk. After all, pomace brandy is produced from the wastes of wine production. Not common here, but a good example will be grappa from Italy and Marc from France, just keep an eye for them. The rest will be, yes, you guessed it, from nations that are proud of their wine production.
A brief history on brandy, it was first distilled mainly to replace wine. Why? Because wine are simply too fragile to survive the rough journey of sea. The spirit kept in cask often watered down to lower strength for drinking after reaching its destination, people also soon realize the cask were able to improve the spirit to be enjoyed neat. Some of the “distilled wine” were added back into wine to prevent turning sour hence the fortified wine we are able to savior today, Port, Marsala, Maidera… which all have high transportability. I am referring to the period where the sky was the limit for transportation.
So, just to sums up things here, all if not, more than 98% of the brandies that available to us are distilled from grape (mainly ugni blanc) unpalatable wine with high acidity (how ironic), produced and aged in the cognac region of France.
We shall go in further and share my encounters with it on the second part of Brandy or to exact, Cognac.
ahhup