Hors d'âge: is armagnac really France’s oldest brandy?

It is a common belief that distilling industry was in place in Armagnac way earlier than in Cognac. According to Wikipedia, armagnac is the first brandy “recorded to be still distilled”, and some even suggest that it is the oldest spirit in the world. But is this really so? To what extent it is legitimate to say that armagnac was France’s premier brandy?

Advocates of armagnac’s primordial pedigree customarily refer to a fourteenth-century medical manual, Pro conservanda sanitate, compiled by a French Franciscan theologian and scholastic philosopher Vitalis of Furno (1260-1327). In this book, a detailed explanation can be found on how to prepare ‘aqua ardens’ from good red wine – by distillation in an alembic, after adding some finely powdered sulphur. 

Aqua ardens (‘burning water’) was one of the Latin terms applied to distilled wine, owing its name to the fact that it contained enough alcohol to burn. It was a by-product of the attempts to turn base metals into gold, a task which dominated the minds of natural philosophers and became central to their alchemical practice.

It is the medical school of Salerno in Italy that is usually credited with earliest experimentation with distilling in Europe (around the middle of the twelfth century). In the beginning of the fourteenth century, instructions on how to distil aqua ardens from wine appeared in the works attributed to a celebrated Catalan physician and alchemist Arnaldus de Villanova (ca. 1240-1311), who for many years taught medicine in the university of Montpellier. Villanova is said to be one of the first scholars to insist upon the virtues of distilled alcohol and describe its applications in detail. His recommendations were reproduced in various pharmaceutical encyclopaedias of the era, and Pro conservanda sanitate was just one of such compilations.

Portrait of Vitalis du Four, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

Vitalis of Furno shares around forty examples of how aqua ardens could be used medicinally, including its ability to cure toothache, headache, asthma, rheumatism, gout, dropsy, and leprosy. According to Vitalis, it could also sharpen the mind and bring back the memory, soothe the wounds and relieve colic pains, and even treat cancer and tuberculosis.

Since Cardinal Vitalis is usually supposed – wrongly – to have been born in the Armagnac region (in reality, his native village is situated closer to Bordeaux), and also because at one point of his ecclesiastic career he was nominated prior of Eauze, an assumption is often made that distilling was common in this area as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century. Armagnac’s official industry body, Bureau National Interprofessionnel de l'Armagnac (BNIA), actively employs these arguments to promote the idea that brandy was made in Gascony long before wine distillation started to be practiced in Cognac.

Problem is that despite the fact that Vitalis du Four was holding the title of prior of Eauze, there is no evidence that he ever visited the capital of Armagnac. So, there is absolutely no reason to presume that the aqua ardens mentioned in his text was actually distilled in the region. And even if distillation was conducted in one of the local monasteries during this period (which is possible, but that will be the case for many other places around France), it would have been done in order to extract and preserve curative virtues of herbs and spices, not to produce intoxicating drinks. Monastic distilling was aimed at making concoctions intended strictly for medicinal use.

An illustration from The Ordinal of Alchemy (Bristol, ca.1477), a manuscript held in The British Library. For some reason, this image has been used (with no ground whatsoever) by André Daguin and Henri Dufor in their book on armagnac with a caption “Alchemist’s workshop in Armagnac in the 13th century”

The late British food historian C. Anne Wilson in her controversial book Water of Life (2006) has argued that Cathars (from the Greek katharoi, pure ones) – a Christian Gnostic sect that thrived in southern France between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries – used distilled spirits it in their baptismal rituals. Such ceremonies supposedly required an inflammable liquid (aqua ardens) to be poured over the head of the Cathar initiate and then ignited. Wilson cites the following passage from Pro conservanda sanitate:

It is called burning [water] because if it is poured over the hair of the head or a scrap of cloth, and a burning candle is applied to it, it immediately takes flame, and the hair of the head, or the cloth, is seen to burn, although neither hair nor cloth is consumed at all, but the flame lasts until the water is completely burnt up.

She then surmises that Vitalis refers here to Gnostics’ ritual fire, and throughout her book insists that wine-distilling was principally employed in ritualistic purposes well into the fourteenth century. Whether aqua ardens will leave no mark on someone’s hair or clothing when ignited (especially if sulphur is added to it) is highly debatable. This assumption certainly didn’t work in the case of the gruesome accident that killed Charles II, the King of Navarre (1332-1387).

Charles, also known as “the Bad”, was a prominent figure in the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. When he was already 54 and suffered from many ailments, his doctors prescribed him to be wrapped head-to-toe in cloths soaked in brandy (note, once again, the medicinal context of its usage at the time). Here’s what happened next:

One of the female attendants of the palace, charged to sew up the cloth that contained the patient, having come to the neck, the fixed point where she was to finish her seam, made a knot according to custom; but as there was still remaining an end of thread, instead of cutting it as usual with scissors, she had recourse to the candle, which immediately set fire to the whole cloth. Being terrified, she ran away, and abandoned the king, who was thus burnt alive in his own palace.

Death of Charles II of Navarre, after an illuminated manuscript from Froissart's Chronicle in the British Museum. Gentleman's Magazine (November 1804)

In 1411, notarial acts of Toulouse mention certain Antoine as ayga ardenterius (that is, distiller of aqua ardens), while the same registers from 1439 indicate that someone called Johan Novelli and his wife were facientes aquam ardentem (‘makers of burning waters’). But these early French (?) distillers operated in the capital of Languedoc, not in Gascony.

There is one document dating to 1441 in the archives of Gers (a town within today’s official production area of armagnac), which mentions ayga ardent – not surprisingly, it is a collection of medical recipes. Thirty or so of them relate to distilled spirit, mainly replicating recommendations given by Villanova and Vitalis of Furno. But then again, since the copyist was using a Catalan dialect to transcribe these recommendations, most historians agree on that this manuscript has its origins in Languedoc, not in the land of future armagnac.

A page from the collection of medical recipes (1441), held in the Departmental Archives of Gers

The first unambiguous reference to spirits in Gascony is found in a regulation from 1461 concerning the market in Saint-Sever Cap-de-Gascogne (today’s Saint-Sever-sur-Adour, close to but still not within present-day Armagnac AOC). The regulation specifies that everyone who brings aygue ardente to the market “for sale” must pay a tax. Although it doesn’t talk about production but only about retailing of brandy, this document is nevertheless an indication that distilled wine gradually starts to become more and more familiar across southern France in this period. However, it still isn’t that common – we don’t find the next mention of anything related to distillation in the region until 1489, when an alembic made of copper and lead was listed in the inventory drawn up after the death of Bernard Dufour, a priest in the small village of Solomiac.

It is interesting to note that curé Dufour also owned vineyards. It is therefore not surprising that the document mentions a couple dozen empty wine barrels and 7 barrels filled with wine. An interesting detail is that the alembic in question does not appear in the section of the inventory that had to do with wine (together with barrels and other wine-making equipment) but is listed among kitchenware and various other house utensils. This means that its size was certainly very small and that it was most likely used purely for pharmaceutical purposes. Perhaps, it wasn’t even wine that was distilled in it – flavours and medicinal value could and were extracted from plants also by boiling them in water and then condensing the vapours.

“Unum alambicum cupri et plumbi pro stillando”. From the list of assets of the deceased Bernard Dufour (1489). Archives départementales du Gers

In France, the transformation of distillation from a small-scale activity aimed predominantly at drawing essential oils from herbs and spices into a proper industry only began in the late sixteenth century and was initially driven by the Dutch. At first it did not concern winegrowers, only traders (who distilled second-rate wines or wine that has gone bad and used the resulting brandewijn to fortify other batches).

Dutch merchants were mainly based in the ports on the Atlantic coast, such as La Rochelle and Nantes. The success of their brandy business, however, causes distillation to gradually spread inland and eau-de-vie starts to also be made in various small towns along the Charente river, including Cognac. As for the Armagnac region, commercial distilling was hardly present there at all until at least the 1650s. As we saw, aygue ardente has been known in this area since the fifteenth century, but for a long time it was little more than an apothecary’s preparation. Only in the second half of the seventeenth century we see distillation appearing there on a relatively large scale.

Contributing to its development after the mid-century was the viticultural crisis of 1655-1690. Taxes on wine became too heavy, the market was too restricted, and wine drinkers declined both in numbers and in purchasing power. As a result, by 1660 wine prices in le Midi collapsed and once-prosperous wine business was no longer remunerative.

An old barrel for transporting armagnac. From André Daguin & Henri Dufor, L'Armagnac (1989)

Grape growers and wine merchants across southern France, seeking to adapt themselves to hard times, turned their eyes on the new market for spirits. Brandy gradually comes to be made whenever the raw materials (wine and wood) were available, with rivers nearby to be able to carry it to the ocean shore.

Contrary to a wide-spread opinion that Armagnac was a remote and isolated part of the country, it was perfectly embedded in the Atlantic economy. Until 1979 the river Adour was navigable from Saint-Sever to its mouth in the Bay of Biscay, with Bayonne being the sea outlet for the region’s exports. Dutch traders, who were the driving force behind the development of French brandy at the time, were actively present in Bayonne in the first quarter of the seventeenth century (at least fifteen of them were registered in the city in 1625). But they were more interested in the wines of Tursan as well as other products from Landes, such as tar, flax, and feathers. Rather characteristically, while around 5,500 barrels of eau-de-vie were shipped from Nantes in 1631 alone, Bayonne customs registers from 1628-29 show only 15.

From 1657 onwards, we see barrels of brandy being exported from Bayonne already in their hundreds. Still not very impressive in comparison to Nantes, this nevertheless represents a significant growth for what was to become ‘armagnac’. In general, its development followed the same pattern as in the Charente region: merchants from big cities on the Atlantic coast beginning to install alembics in areas where wine was produced and sign vignerons up on long-term supply contracts.

Frontispice of Le Parfait Négociant by Jacques Savary (Paris, 1675)

After 1657, we start finding numerous evidence of local winegrowers receiving copper stills from their Dutch and Portuguese associates in Bayonne and Bordeaux. It is then that armagnac begins to gain international recognition, although for a long time the Netherlands remained its main market – more than 90 percent of the barrels shipped from Bayonne in the second half of the seventeenth and around 80 percent during the first quarter of the eighteenth century were bound for the Dutch ports.

Armagnac should really be seen as a product of opportunistic attempts by latecomers into Dutch brandy business to mimic the fortunes of early distilling pioneers operating in the Charentes and tap into the category’s fast growth by transplanting their commercial models onto new territories with similar conditions. Ironically, it was a much higher quality of Gascon wines that explains a delay in the introduction of commercial distilling in the region – Dutch merchants in Bayonne simply didn’t have any incentive to distil local wines, for in Amsterdam a barrel of Tursan wine was at least 60 percent more expensive than a barrel of Bordeaux. And even after the viticultural crisis of the second half of the seventeenth century forced them to turn to brandy-making, for a long time it remained a means of dealing with excess supplies of wine – a subsidiary of the wine industry rather than an industry in its own right.

View of the City and of the Port of Bayonne, Charles Nicolas Cochin (1764). Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva

Moreover, armagnac was often blended with brandy from Cognac, as less scrupulous merchants paid little attention to the origin of individual barrels. We have to wait until the middle of the nineteenth century for armagnac to be recognized as a distinct type of eau-de-vie. But even after this becomes common, for quite some time it continued to be seen as a second-rate product in comparison to cognac. For example, this is what Alexandre Dumas, the literary father of the most famous Gascon of all times – d'Artagnan, a fictionalized namesake of the real musketeer who was killed by a Dutch bullet during the siege of Maastricht in 1673 – wrote in his Grand dictionnaire de cuisine:

The eaux-de-vie of Armagnac have a well-deserved reputation; they are fine, more delicate than those of the Charentes; their bouquet is completely different from that of the latter, and, it must be said, it is generally less pleasing.

Dumas’ complimentary but somewhat condescending comment probably had to do with the fact that in the second half of the nineteenth century most armagnac makers already switched to the new distilling apparatus – alambic armagnacais that we know today. It was based on the design developed in 1801 by a French chemist Jean-Édouard Adam from Montpellier (note once again how important this city was in the history of distillation technology). Adam’s idea was to prepare a strong enough eau-de-vie in one operation, which he tried to attain by running the condensate counter-current to the vapours rising from the still and thus enriching it with alcohol to produce the desired strength of the distillate in one run. His invention was therefore a direct precursor of the modern fractionating column still.

Adam’s apparatus allowed to significantly lower distillation costs due to heat economy and therefore attracted much attention from brandy producers. In Armagnac, the still was first used by Marquis Antoine de Mellet de Bonas in his château shortly after it was patented by Adam. During the nineteenth century, several modifications were made to Adam’s model by armagnac distillers until the alambic armagnacais acquired all the features characteristic of it today.

Armagnac distillers (photo, Édit. Fénestra). Musée de l'Armagnac, Gers

Armagnac still represents a cylindrical column containing a number of perforated copper plates, to which wine – preheated by the upper part of the condensing coil inside the adjacent cooler – is gravity-fed from above. As the wine drops from plate to plate, its temperature increases. It finally reaches the boiler at the bottom of the column and starts evaporating. The alcohol vapours rise back to the top of the column, passing through the wine that is flowing down. In the process, they heat the wine up and strip it of water and other unwanted compounds. The vapours then travel through the serpentine coil and finally condense into clear eau-de-vie with a strength between 52 and 65% ABV. Brandy production can be thus completed in a single go (in French it is called simple-chauffe), meaning that you have to charge the still only once, without the need to stop after the first distillation to empty out the deposits, refill it with brouillis, and conduct a second chauffe to get to the final product.

This notion of armagnac being ‘single-distilled’ (as opposed to cognac’s double distillation) is often misinterpreted, contributing to its reputation as a more artisanal and hence more ancient type of brandy. In reality, the alambic armagnacais is nothing but a primitive version of a continuous column still.

To sum up: is armagnac a fantastic product with a unique taste and centuries of craft and tradition behind? Absolutely. Its region’s continental climate and sandy soils, as well as unique distillation methods that are practiced there, make it distinctly different from cognac, with many consumers actually preferring armagnac’s heavier texture and rustic appeal. Its history is no less fascinating than that of its cousin from the Charentes. But can one say that armagnac is “France’s first brandy”? I don’t think so.

Alexandr Gorokhovskiy

©2024

Bibliography and further reading:

Frédéric Lebel, The Quintessence of Armagnac (Paris: Cherche Midi, 2011).

Vitalis of Furno, Pro conservanda sanitate (Mainz, 1531).

André Daguin, Henri Dufor, L'Armagnac (Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1989).

Henri Dufor, Armagnac: eaux de vie et terroir (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1982).

Colin Duncan Taylor, Menu from the Midi: A Gastronomic Journey through the South of France (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2021).

Anne C. Wilson, Water of Life: A History of Wine-Distilling and Spirits, 500 BC-AD 2000 (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2006).

Francis William Blagdon, Paris as It Was and as It Is: Or, a Sketch of the French Capital (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1803).

René Cuzcaq, ‘Les trente emplois de l’eau-de-vie comme remède en 1441’, Bulletin de la Société archéologique, historique, littéraire et scientifique du Gers (1er trimestre 1959), 89-93.

Gilbert Loubés, ‘Le première mention d’un alambic gascon au Moyen Âge’, Bulletin de la Société archéologique du Gers (3ème trimestre 1981), 229-34.

Francis Brumont, ‘Aux origines de la production des eaux-de-vie d’Armagnac’, in L’univers du vin: Actes du colloque de Bordeaux (4-5 octobre 2012), ed. Bernard Bodinier, Stéphanie Lachaud, and Corinne Marache (Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 325-38.

Alexandre Dumas, Grand dictionnaire de cuisine (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1873).