Carafes

A carafe bottling is what a brandy house does when the liquid inside is old enough to deserve a shape of its own. This page collects those releases. The Armagnac side runs deepest: Darroze Les Grands Assemblages in a ladder of twenty, thirty, forty and fifty years, plus Castarede, Delord and several from Tariquet including the Folle Blanche five year, which shows the grape while it is still young and floral.

The cognac is almost all Grande Champagne, the chalkiest and slowest ageing of the six crus. Normandin-Mercier XO 30 Years, Francois Voyer XO Gold and Cristal, Jean Fillioux So Elegantissime, and a run of Paul Giraud XO carafes topped by Tres Rare 58 Years in its quadro carafe.

Beyond the brandy houses the same habit turns up elsewhere. Rhum J.M Vieux Canopee comes from Martinique, where cane juice rhum carries its own French appellation, and St James l'Essentiel blends three vintages from the same island. Clase Azul Reposado arrives in hand painted ceramic made in Mexico, a different craft doing the same job. See also cognac and Armagnac, delivered across Australia.

History

The decanter started as a working tool. Wine came out of a cask, not a bottle, and it needed a clean vessel to reach the table in, so the carafe existed long before anyone thought of it as decoration. The word itself travelled from the Arabic gharrafa through Spanish and Sicilian into French. Venetian glassmakers made the elegant early versions, but the object we recognise arrived in England after George Ravenscroft developed lead glass in the 1670s. Lead made glass heavier, softer and clear enough to cut, and by the eighteenth century the stoppered decanter had become standard because a stopper stopped the wine oxidising between the first pour and the last.

Brandy borrowed the form for a different reason. Cognac and Armagnac houses hold stock for decades, and the oldest blends were traditionally offered to important customers in a glass vessel rather than a bottle. That became a commercial signal: carafe presentation still marks the top of a house's range today. The Paul Giraud quadro carafe and the Darroze Grands Assemblages series are both direct descendants of that habit.

One useful thing to know is that this has nothing to do with letting the spirit breathe. Aged brandy is stable and throws no sediment, so the carafe here is about presentation and about a vessel worth keeping when the spirit is gone. The wine tradition and the spirit tradition simply converged on the same shape. There is more history behind the liquid in brandy.

How to drink it

Serve aged brandy at room temperature, no ice, no chilling. Use a tulip glass with a narrowing rim rather than the wide balloon your grandparents had, because the balloon concentrates alcohol vapour at the nose and hides everything else. Do not warm the glass over a flame either; the heat of a hand on the bowl is enough and anything hotter drives off the delicate aromatics you paid for.

Pour small, about thirty millilitres, and give it five minutes in the glass. An old Armagnac such as Darroze Les Grands Assemblages releases in stages, and the second half of the glass tastes different from the first. Water is unnecessary at the 40 to 43 per cent most of these are bottled at, though a single drop can lift an old, tight spirit. The stronger ones take it more easily, the Tariquet Folle Blanche at 45 per cent and the J.M Vieux Canopee at 46. With food, keep it after the meal: dark chocolate, walnuts, hard cheese, or nothing at all.

On storage, always stand a carafe upright. Long contact between high strength spirit and a cork or composite stopper degrades it and taints the liquid, which is the single most common way people ruin a good bottle. Spirit at this strength keeps for years once opened, but a nearly empty carafe will fade, so finish the last third within a year. If you clean an emptied one to reuse, hot water and a long dry upside down, never detergent. Start with Normandin-Mercier XO 30 Years. More gift ready bottles sit in Christmas.