Here's to Armagnac Season with a glass of Cassoulet!
Champêtre: Les Artisans-Meet Armagnac.
Welcome to the L’Artisans section of Champêtre Field Guide—this is a place to learn more about the people and products that make French culture so unique. Unchanged and preserved for history, shared with the world, celebrated and lauded throughout the regions that claim their own, the products of France are a way of understanding the lifestyle that begins at home.
Armagnac is Champêtre in a glass.
I had forgotten how much can change in 35 years. When I first arrived in this very southwestern part of Southwest France, a cultural duchy called Gascony, when visiting people in their homes, I was often served a small delicate glass with two plump Pruneaux d’Agen floating in an Armagnac-infused syrup—an afternoon pick me up or a finish to a swell meal. If I were with the oldest generations, I might be offered a little duck, un petit canard because I was a lady and ladies weren’t offered shots of booze; I would be passed a soupspoon holding a sugar cube doused with a few mere drops of amber brandy and proffered like a dollop of Mary Poppins medicine. Then miraculously, I grew up. I became enough of a connoisseur to impress the maître de chai (the cellar master or the distiller himself) and was treated accordingly as I walked my way through heady hors d’age blends and back in time through stellar vintages of exceptional years—“1951, the year we married; 1978, the year my wife died…” These solitary vintages would be set aside for 20, 30, or 50 years as a grande millésime—a few times every decade. Whatever the dose, I discovered I loved Armagnac, its perfume, its complex layers of flavors, and its stories.
Where do you start? Like most things, I begin like a greedy escargot at the edge of the garden patch, working my way slowly and closer to the heart of the bed and the most succulent prizes within. So, let's begin with what Armagnac is. And what it isn’t. The first question is always, “What exactly is Armagnac?”