Jean Grosperrin worked as a cognac broker in the Cognac region. A broker in eaux-de-vie plays a very discreet yet strategic role between the producer and the buyer. His job is to evaluate the quality of the eaux-de-vie and to introduce interested parties to each other. His profession takes him to many cellars to estimate the value of different batches, among which there are sometimes some very old cognacs. Practically all vine growers distill their own harvest and they usually conserve, as former generations have done before them, some barrels of cognac in their cellars. These family treasures are very rarely up for sale and the transactions are very confidential. It is these cognacs, sometimes very atypical with strong personalities that Jean and his son Guilhem (since 2004) seek to obtain in all of the appellations of Cognac. “I am particularly attracted to these small batches of rare cognacs which bear witness to an era now past, when vines were cultivated using horses and when the art of distillation made the vine grower spend all day and all night next to the alembic to control the intensity of the flames and the cooling vapours.” Many of the oldest cognacs have lost up to 80% of their initial volume as a result of natural evaporation.
