Chateau de Montifaud VSOP Cognac
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Wine
Enthusiast
Product Details
Distiller Notes
Eight to ten years old. The first eight months are spent in new oak. Notes of vine leaf in the nose, which leans toward dried flowers.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Luscious brown sugar, vanilla, cocoa, hazelnut and lots of oak lead this Cognac on nose and palate, which winds into a long, drying, fairly hot finish spiced with clove. Fine Petite Champagne region. Blend of 8–10 year old brandies.
Chateau de Montifaud is located in Jarnac-Champagne in the Petite Champange sub-region of Cognac, as are the majority of its vineyards. The family farms 120 hectares of grapes, and 110 of those are in Petite Champagne, with the other ten hectares in nearby Grande Champagne. Petite Champagne's signature is its soil, which is full of chalk and capable of making cognac built to age with great depth and complexity, with single vintages in the Chateau de Montifaud going back over one hundred years. In order to achieve this depth and complexity, maturation times need to significantly exceed the required minimums in Cognac. For example, Chateau de Montifaud's VSOP is aged for eight to 10 years instead of the required four, and its X.O. is aged for 28 to 30 years instead of the required six and a half.
Widely regarded as the finest and most complex grape-based spirit in the world, Cognac follows rigorously strict production guidelines. It is made exclusively of wine—most commonly from Ugni Blanc—from the Charente and Charente-Maritime regions surrounding the town of Cognac in southwestern France. After a second distillation in antique copper pot stills (called charentais), the spirit is transferred to French oak barrels and aged a minimum of two years (VS). Cognac is classified by both age and region (Cru). The Grande Champagne Cru and Petite Champagne Cru, both having shallow limestone soils, are the most respected.