Maison Martell: The Oldest of the Great Cognac Houses
Look closely at a bottle of Martell and you'll find a bird in flight. It's a swift, and it's there for a reason. The swift is the only bird able to cross the Atlantic in a single, unbroken flight, and the young Jean Martell used to watch them wheel over the cliffs of his native Jersey. The legend says he followed one south, across the sea and into the Charente. He never really left.
That was more than three hundred years ago. Martell was founded in 1715, which makes it the oldest of the great cognac houses, older than Rémy Martin, Hennessy and Courvoisier. To drink it is to taste a continuity almost no other spirit can offer.
A young man from Jersey
Jean Martell was not French. He came from the Channel Island of Jersey, and at just twenty-one he became the first foreign entrepreneur to specialise in buying and exporting eaux-de-vie from the Charentes. It was a bold bet by an outsider on a region and a craft that were still finding their feet, and it paid off. By the late 1700s the young United States had become one of Martell's most important markets. In 1858 came the first official order from China. From 1884, Martell was supplying the Russian Tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II among them.
Jean Martell believed, in his own words, that "our duty must be pleasure, and our pleasure duty." It is a good sentence to keep in mind while you drink.
The widow who saved the house
The most remarkable chapter of the Martell story belongs not to Jean but to his wife. When Jean died, Rachel Lallemand Martell was left at thirty-three with a growing business to run and seven children to raise alone, the youngest just twenty months old, the eldest fourteen. She did not step back. From 1753 to 1775 she led the house herself, steering it through some of its most formative years.
She led with conscience, too. When a run of failed harvests brought famine to the Cognac region in 1770, and again when hardship struck Poitou in 1785, the Martell family gave away barrels of wine and sacks of grain, shipped in from northern Europe and Poland, to feed the poor. Rachel's standard for the house was simple and exacting: "It must be the best," she said, "but without artifice." Three centuries later, that line still describes exactly how Martell is made.
What makes a Martell taste like a Martell
Two decisions, taken long ago and never abandoned, give Martell its unmistakable character.
The first is clear-wine distillation. Among the great cognac houses, Martell stands alone in distilling only clear wines, with all the lees and sediment removed before the spirit ever meets the flame, and then distilling them twice. It is a choice of quality over quantity. Stripping the wine back this way loses volume but reveals a purer, more elegant fruit, and it is the reason a Martell can feel so clean and so precise on the palate.
The second is the Borderies. This is the smallest of Cognac's six growing zones, a tiny pocket of chalk and clay prized for round, nutty, faintly floral spirits. Martell has always favoured it, and today the family owns more vineyard than any other cognac brand, with land across the four main crus and its heart in the Borderies. Its most celebrated blend, Cordon Bleu, is built around Borderies eaux-de-vie, aged in special fine-grain oak barrels chosen so the tannins seep in slowly, giving generous but never heavy aromas.
A house of libraries and palaces
Martell was always a house of curiosity as much as commerce. A great library was begun in 1720, filled with literary, religious and philosophical works, and the family subscribed to the earliest illustrated newspapers of the age. Something of that spirit endures in the archive Martell keeps to this day: nearly five kilometres of ledgers, order books, drawings and posters, more than twice the entire archive of the town of Cognac itself.
Its bottles have travelled in glamorous company. Cordon Bleu was launched in 1912 at the Hôtel de Paris in Monaco. In 1956, the tables at the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco were set with Martell. And since 2007, the house has been a patron of the Palace of Versailles, funding the restoration of the Queen's Grand Dining Room and the salon de l'Abondance. As the family's Theodore Martell once put it, "quality is our strongest weapon. Better to sacrifice a few orders than compromise on quality."
How it tastes, and how to drink it
If you're meeting Martell for the first time, the entry point is Martell VS, a blend whose youngest eau-de-vie has rested at least two years. Expect a rich, clear gold in the glass and intense aromas of plum, apricot and candied lemon, then a supremely smooth, fruity palate. It sips beautifully on its own, but thanks to that clean fruit it is also made for cocktails and long drinks, even served frozen straight from the freezer, where the fruit turns bright and vivid.
However you take it, take your time. The Martell way is unhurried:
Pour a small measure into a tulip glass and hold it by the base.
Swirl gently to release the aromas.
Raise it to eye level to admire the colour, then bring it slowly to your nose.
Take a careful sip and let it travel across your palate before you swallow.
Go slowly, little by little. Never a shot.
Three hundred years, fifteen generations, one swift still crossing the Atlantic. That's a lot to hold in a single glass. Which is rather the point.
New to cognac? Start with our guide, What Is Cognac?, then come back and taste the house that has been doing it longest.
