Salles d’Angles and Bouteville terroirs. Two perspectives through different ages and different methods (blend/single cask).
Prunier 20yo Grande CHAMPAGNE 43% (2024 bottling)
20yo GC blend from Salle d’Angles terroir. 43%. Let’s go!
Colour: Orange, hay lights. Irregular medium tears.
Nose: A full basket of yellow fruits at first. You can anticipate a certain kind of creaminess in there, with obvious vanilla shades. Slightly astringent and a tad too alcohol-forward. Let’s see if it gets better with air.
Palate: Oily texture, maybe a little sugary in the mouthfeel. Cooked pears, green apple, crushed walnuts. Classic XO shades, even if I miss precision here. A tad acidic in the aftertaste. Quite angular, with sawdust and ginger notes.
Last Notes: A bit easier with air. Nice spiced scents on cinnamon and clove. Caramel and nutty notes then. Back on the palate, you still get some kind of astringency before some shy fruity aromas. Short/medium mouth length.
Well, not a huge fan of this 20yo GC from Prunier. Don’t know if it’s due to a sugary mouthfeel, the oak integration or the water reduction, but I clearly miss balance here. And don’t understand the discrepancy between the nose (quite clean, typical 20yo GC bouquet, 86) and the palate (a tad imprecise, astringent, 82).
84/100
Old Brothers Paul Giraud Exotic 4.3 40,3%
528 bottles. Very old GC from Paul Giraud (43yo?), released in 2017. Let’s go!
Colour: Amber, gold lights. Irregular heavy tears.
Nose: Precious and ample cigar notes (very much so, with these fresh cedar notes in the background). Exotic is the right word, needless to say. Guava, roasted pineapple, passion fruit. Appealing nose for sure. Distinct green tea shades as another layer of complexity. Noble rancio of a great eau-de-vie.
Palate: Ample texture to carry an explosive exotism. Dry funky rancio, oscillating between a 45yo Pays d’Auge Calvados, an intense Macanudo cigar note and an acidulous 30yo Ténarèze Armagnac. A certain kind of rusticity that I wasn’t expecting there. Vibrant Cognac, maybe a bit brutal contrary to what its ABV could indicate.
Last Notes: Lovely nose again. Banana peel, peppermint, pistachio. More on the musky side with air, quite mushroomy too. Back to the palate, I am less appealed by the oak integration. Lack of terroir backbone (I’m not that used to tasting very old Bouteville GC)? A tad of acidulous notes (guava, grapefruit) as a signature of the chalky soil, but not enough to escape from a mammoth cask effect. It ends on mango juice and cherry sweets.
A very nice venerable GC (easy 88+), but I can’t keep myself from thinking that there is a piece of the puzzle missing here. Terroir backbone? Oak integration? Too much wet cellar (so the cognac fell on itself)? However, exotic side + rusticity = perfect recipe for rum lovers, isn’t?
Many thanks to Charles!
89/100
A new way to explore Cognac terroirs
These two tastings also lead to a broader question that has been at the heart of Hors d’Age for some time: how much can we actually read a Cognac through its terroir?
Grande Champagne, Petite Champagne, Fins Bois… but also the villages, hills and producers behind these broader appellations. Over the years, I have accumulated hundreds of tasting notes, often with a precise origin attached to the eau-de-vie. It felt increasingly frustrating to leave all this information scattered across individual reviews.
So I am introducing a new section on Hors d’Age dedicated to Cognac terroirs, built around an interactive map.
The idea is simple: explore the appellation geographically and connect specific places to the Cognacs I have tasted from them. A way to look at terroir not only through maps and geological descriptions, but also through actual glasses — and, hopefully, to continue identifying recurring aromatic or structural patterns from one place to another.
This is very much a work in progress, and the map will grow alongside the tasting archive.
Daniel Bouju Réserve Familiale 42% (2021 bottling)
0 comments on “Two GC perspectives”Add yours →