How do the French cognac

• How do the French cognac

The trip program resembled something between a dizzying height of alcoholic and marathon. Every day we had a minimum of two cognac house: tasting began with the morning, gave way to lunch or dinner at the wine and then continued again.

However, despite the circumstances, I still managed to do something that did not happen in the last trip: take a picture of the whole brandy production process from A to Z ...

Another cognac house that we visited with the friendly tasting visit - Pierre Ferrand. During familiarization with the owner of the house we found a curious thing: brandy production process is monitored by a special supervisory government agency. Therefore ideas such as "write on one bottle and pour the other" is not possible in principle. As an illustration, we told the story of how one experimenter poured into a barrel of sawdust to enhance flavor, put on five months in prison and banned from cognac business in the future:

On the other side of the producers themselves are trying to keep the brand. For example, under the rules of chemical weapons can not be under the age of six years, but in fact all the houses set the bar even higher - ten to fifteen:

In yet Pierre Ferrand showed us various places - dry and wet. Speaking in a nutshell, the specific warehouse is such that when wet with age alcohols evaporate and dry - water. Sophisticated storage scheme in both skaladah allows you to adjust the fortress finished beverage:

As early as cognac storehouses specially bred spiders. They struggle with parasites that bite the barrel:

The owner of the house Pierre Ferrand:

This De Luze - a huge economy. Their full production cycle, in addition, large house to buy from De Luze cognac spirits for their blends:

So, it all starts with the grape. One of the main varieties for the production of cognac is Ugni blanc:

Gather grapes with special devices:

The machine goes to the vineyard, the vine enters the collection, which confuses the crop and sends it on the conveyor up to the tanks:

Inside full of hi-tech: a tablet, a joystick:

harvested grapes are brought into the first shop and dump into a special bath:

He goes from the receiver to the masher, where grape juice is obtained. Use a masher, which grind the bones, is prohibited by law:

The control panel:

Then the juice comes in huge vats where the fermentation process and the grape juice into wine:

The wine is ready. Now it is sent to the distillation unit, where prepared brandy alcohol.

The process is elementary: digested wine and alcohol on the coil is collected in special containers. An interesting point: in alcohol have conditional "head" and "tail" - the first and last liters haul. Some houses, such as the previous Pierre Ferrand, do not use these parts, but only the "heart" - the main part:

A schematic layout of the machine:

The distillation takes place in two stages: the first stage provides a basic strength of the distillate of about 30%. He then distilled again. It was the second fraction, about 70% strength and goes to further aging in oak barrels:

Even the barrels makes De Luze yourself, about 150 a year. Report from the cooperage production I was lecturing in the year before:

An important stage - burning barrels:

workshop where makes De Luze the hood for its brandy - to mix different alcohols:

No less impressive looks and storage:

But the cognac alcohol barrel specifically for Remy Martin:

Of course, here too there is a "paradise":

In the production of De Luze I finally saw how the brandy is poured into bottles:

Cognac - not beer, so a small bottling line, a lot going on manually. First, clean and empty bottles placed on Convair:

A line of bottles falls into the "carousel", where, in fact, happening spill. Specialist closely monitors the process:

Then the wind onto the plug:

The next stage - the labeling and excise duties:

I noticed that the machine opens the lid and decided it was better to stick to the camera than to shoot through the glass. As soon as it opened, the line immediately became and bottles began to accumulate. Fortunately, I have not detected: