You’ll find Frapin Château de Fontpinot at the heart of Cognac’s Grande Champagne subregion—hence “Premier Cru de Cognac” on the label.
Not only is it the most significant farm distillery in the region, but it’s also the only estate in Grande Champagne entitled to call itself “Château.”1 Its 240ha (593 acres) of vines make it significantly larger than any Médoc first growth. Fontpinot has been in family ownership for more than 750 years (now shepherded by one branch of the Cointreau family); all of Frapin’s Cognac comes from the vines that rise and roll away to each side of the buildings. Soft Charentais rain and tempered light produce fresh Ugni Blanc grapes each growing season; meticulously aged Cognac, in flask-like bottles, is driven away from the farm year-round. A multitude of interventions are needed to turn the former into the latter. They all happen here.
Frapin has recently released a 1998 Vintage Cognac and its Trilogie No.1—a blend of three older vintages (1986, 1988, and 1990). Some notes on the enjoyment of these are given below. In January 2025, I had the opportunity to talk to Patrice Piveteau, Frapin’s maître de chai, about his work and approach in bringing these spirits to market.
Frapin: Time and terroir
The 1998 vintage was the result of a generous season, a warm dry summer, and relatively high levels of ripeness. “Concentration of sugars,” says Patrice, “is part of the Frapin style.” This intrigued me, since I’d always understood that Cognac distillers want relatively thin, high-acid wines of just 9% ABV or so. “I begin to make Frapin with a bunch of grapes,” says Patrice. “I want that sense of fruit. To have fruit in an eau-de-vie, it must be there in the wine. I can control everything here. If you’re running a large house with a thousand growers, you can’t control everything. The rules forbid sulfur additions, remember, in any wine to be distilled into Cognac. Without sulfur, it’s safer to have lower alcohol and higher acidity. I don’t have that constraint; I have my hand on the tiller. So, I distill wines of between 10% and 11% ABV; even 11.5% doesn’t worry me.”
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I wondered if he could tell how good the spirit was going to be as it distills—by the odors in the air or its look as it trickles from the condensing coil. “The earliest period of quality assessment is just after distillation. But it’s not error-free; it’s a long-term game. You can sometimes be encouraged, only to be disappointed later.” He does, though, physically taste right from the beginning, “even at 50% or more. Just a tiny sip, for confirmation and to look at balance. You can’t do everything on the nose; the mouth is important, too.”
This particular bottling is the first outing for the 1998 vintage, at the 25-year mark. “Exactly when a vintage is ready is rather subjective, but in general you can say that there are ‘short’ vintages and ‘long’ vintages. The 1991, for example, was wonderful after just 20 years, but others take much longer and need 30 years. The 1998 is somewhere in the middle. It’s not a grande précoce, for sure.”
Frapin has both humid ground-floor warehouses with beaten earth floors, as well as much drier attic storage, and the aging patterns (and evaporation rates) are different in each. You get roundness and suppleness from humid cellars, where evaporation is 2% a year, but more aromatic finesse, rancio, and floral notes from drier cellars, albeit at a cost of 4% losses each year. Unusually, the 1998 was principally aged in humid cellar conditions. Is that because it was what the spirit seemed to require? Patrice laughs. “I’m going to disappoint you: We don’t have that many rules. I prefer to work by intuition. But what I can say is that I need to work at creating variability in order to have a full blending palate. We’re lucky enough to be an estate distillery and to have all of our vineyards around the château. That’s great because it gives us wonderful quality and a lot of control. It also gives us a lot of consistency. This cuts both ways. We don’t have the variability in our raw materials that a large house would have, and variability is very useful for blending. So, I have to work at creating some variability. Aging in different warehouse conditions and at different alcoholic strengths to obtain different extraction rates from the wood are ways of doing that.”
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Another element of this variability, of course, is the use of Limousin casks (generally larger than wine barrels—and usually 350 liters at Frapin) of different ages. All of Frapin’s Cognac starts life (between six months and a year) in new or newish barrels, not least because it needs this time in new wood to acquire color naturally. The young Cognac is then moved to “middle-aged” casks known as fûts roux, aged between five and 15 years; these are the casks that enable Patrice to make “adjustments to the style and aging trajectory” of the Cognac. After that comes the long finishing period in casks between 20 and 100 years old. “A long passage in good old casks is essential; that’s when you get the rancio and the aromatic finesse.” The pattern of aging of a particular vintage isn’t, though, a function of that vintage. “It’s not like wine; we’d never decide on ‘more or less wood’ depending on the vintage, as you might with a wine. Cognac is more regular, and aging is more significant than for wine. When I think about our Fontpinot terroir, for example, I don’t just think about slopes and soils. For me, the Fontpinot cellars and our stock of barrels are a part of that terroir. Everything happens on the basis of suivie et dégustation [tracking and tasting]. Time is a part of the richness of Cognac. And every cask is different.”
Alchemy and complexity
What about Trilogie No.1? Why blend three different vintages? “When I create something, I start with an idea. My colleagues then prepare some samples based around that idea, and then we taste blind, to put it to the test. Sometimes nothing is good, and nothing comes of it. But with the Trilogie, it happened quite quickly, and the original ideas were good—we got there soon. The process is a very practical one.” The idea came from the success that Frapin had had with its series of seven different Multimillésime blends, the first of which went onto the market in 2008. “We won lots of awards for those, and they also brought together three vintages, though the average ages were around 20 years. The idea here was to do something similar with older Cognacs, using 1990 for the structure and frame of the blend, filling in and painting the canvas with the 1988 and 1986.”
What did each of those two vintages bring? “You know, it’s hard to say that a particular element in the blend comes from one of the three vintages. What you find when you blend is that the blend itself takes on a life of its own. Sometimes it’s hard to say that an element comes from one of the ingredients—there seems to be a kind of alchemy at work.” When I ask if a successful blend must always be more complex than its individual elements, there is a long pause. “I think the answer is probably ‘yes,’” he finally replies. “When you blend, you give yourself more chance of complexity. And for Frapin, too, there’s another reason: We don’t have to do this. We don’t do it every year; it’s up to me. We only do it if it’s really worthwhile.”
Tasting
Frapin Millésime 1998 25 Ans d’Âge Cognac Grande Champagne Premier Cru de Cognac (40.2% ABV)
A bright golden amber in color. The first aromas to rise from the glass are dark, almost somber: sandalwood and fenugreek over bass notes that suggest raisins, wooden logs, dried mushrooms, and undergrowth. Swirling the spirit brings out more sweetness: soft raisins and date paste. The spirit is concentrated and succulent on the palate, with a butter-toffee richness behind dried fruit, warm stones, and honeycomb. There are also floral rancio notes, but they take time to emerge and never dominate; rather, they send an aerial billow through the dense, warming drench. Adding a little water brings gentleness, harmony, and softness to the Cognac, but all the elements remain discernible, and the dark wealth of the vintage remains a hallmark. | 93
Trilogie Frapin No.1: 1986–1988–1990 Cognac Grande Champagne Premier Cru de Cognac (41.2% ABV)
Sienna gold; not notably deeper than the Vintage 1998, despite the extra decade’s age. The aromas have astonishing lift and engagement: crystallized violet and orange over a bass line of crème anglaise and marzipan. If anything, the Cognac grows still more ethereal in the mouth than on the nose: a bunch of flowers opening, climbing, and filling the mouth with floral grace as the spirit warms on the tongue. Gentian and freesias, ballasted by earth, cream, and cold winter stone beneath; every tiny sip triggers 30 seconds or more of palate diversion. A small addition of water brings yet more aromatic lift. The palate seems to “drink” the water with no loss of concentration, though its complexity becomes easier to read and the notes of soil, stone, and root clearer and more prominent within the whole. | 96
RRP for the Frapin Millésime 1998 is €190 and for the Trilogie Frapin No.1 €350 / £275 (available in the UK through The Whisky Exchange).
NOTE
1. The use of the term “Château” is more closely circumscribed in Charente than it is in Gironde, according to Patrice Piveteau, and can be used only of a property dominated by a significant historical building.
