A posh loft...
When we choose an Airbnb, our criteria usually are:
Close to town centre
Monthly price between 800-1300 GBP
Dog friendly
Near a park to walk Didi and/or the sea
Near sport/activities
Decent reviews
This usually leaves us with 4-6 options worth looking at. Cognac only had 2 and the Airbnb loft we chose still worked out as the priciest per day out of all the ones we booked. Since Cognac is a small town, I was a bit surprised. It didn't occur to me at the time of booking that Cognac is a posh drink and its influences soaks the whole town, similarly to Universities do in Cambridge. When you walk around, you see buildings linked to Cognac in different ways : Cognac makers HQs, Cognac storage halls, showrooms, museums, stores, and lots of ex-Cognac making buildings converted to... nightclubs or Airbnbs! We're talking about a massive industry linked to this place, 220 million bottles sold just last year worth over $4 billion profit. About 20,000 people live of Cognac-related jobs just in the region. With this, our Airbnb loft was a mastery of classy design!
A map of France on the wall was made out of Cognac bottle corks, I wonder if the owner had to drink them all in the name of Art, that'd be what, about 250 bottles? Yikes... If I were him I'd probably drink them on his sofa, the most comfortable sofa I've ever sat on, stuffed with feathers? So much so that I was daydreaming about strapping it to the Polo's roof (the sofa not the owner). Sigh. In the end I let go of the idea, given the size of this heavenly sofa, we could only have gotten away driving with it strapped to the car on African roads.
Cognac, wars, angels and horse manure
We decided to visit the HQ of the brand selling the most bottles in the world, Hennessy, then the more family-orientated and smaller Bache Gabrielsen for contrast. It felt a bit like a Disneyland vs. Edinburgh castle, the first tour with special effects and fancy large buildings who looked like 5 star hotel suites, the second homely and musty where we were lucky to meet one of the greatest 'noses' responsible for mixing the House's Cognacs (called Master of Chais or Master blender).
Each house only has 1 to 7 Master blenders to mix their Cognacs so imagine if one of them catches Covid. In fact, Jean-Philippe whom we met did and lost his sense of smell for two whole weeks, that must have cost a bomb given that Master blenders can taste up to 50 mixes a day to run their current and future 'flavour compositions'!
We're not huge fans of the drink itself which tastes a bit like a whiskey, but more expensive and less tasty. It was super cool (or rather hyper cool, see further below) to learn about the process of making Cognac and its history though. For instance: looking at rows of vintage barrels from 1914, 1870, 1946 etc... we reflected that while half of France was bombarded to rubbles during the past centuries' wars, Cognac did a hell of a job preserving their vintage barrels (especially rare ones bottled in a section called "Le paradis").
We put the question 'how' and while some houses hid barrels below horse stables (under planks and manure), others parked their principles and got the Germans to look the other way by offering them a few barrels on the house. As for the main benefactors of the Cognac making process, they are a bit more elusive: the aging process for Cognac (as it does for Whisky) involves loss of some alcohol through natural evaporation from oak barrels (up to 6%!). This is essential for the alcohol content to reduce and for the Cognac to reach its optimal taste. Echoeing the Paradise vintage section, this is suitably called "The Angels' share".
Ha yes, and talking about bombs, Cognac makers are restricted on how many barrels they can hold in the city so the whole of it doesn't blow up!
French karaoke, Singer doubles and "la Star Ac"
We missed out on testing the fancy looking White house nightclub due to random French opening times (supermarkets close on Mondays, Clubs only open Thursdays through Saturdays, some open markets only run Tuesdays, the office for tourists never seems to be open... and all of those close whenever a French person feels like a short break to enjoy life, which seems to be every two weeks on average). Instead, we krashed a less fancy local pub called "The Garage" for a French Karaoke night. After checking the vibe, we finally decided against our usual Wiley - Boasty (Feat. Stefflon Don, Sean Paul & Idris Elba) and instead, graced the local crowd with a rendition of the somewhat more acceptable Julien Doré's Coco câline. While some of the keen karaoke singers could be described as, erm... atrociously endearing, a 65 year old gentleman won the crowd and the night by miles with an award-winning worth rendition of the 1978 hit Femme, femme, femme by Serge Lama. Bumping into the bar owner the next day while walking our respective dogs, we found out the gentleman in question used to be a double for huge singers like Serge if they fell ill before a performance. The stars mimed their songs on stage while our man sang them live from the shade backstage. I suppose we could call him a 'Singer double'.
Anyway, it was wild and we had a great boogie on all sorts of random tunes. This helped build Cuong's knowledge of French culture and 1970s-2020s songs, which we polished a lot lately after becoming addicted to watching "La Star Académie", a kinda X Factor TV show.
Seems we were as passionate as the French to support the shy underdog girl with a tough past with an amazing voice (Anisha) and send home the rich pretty girl who sings flat (Enola). Compared to the Made in Essex crowd in the UK, we were impressed by how smart and non-bitchy the youths were, but ended up picking some dodgy habbits of saying "truc de OUF!" (crazy stuff!), and "Hyper..." (Mega...) every 5 minutes. 🙄😣
Our short 5 day stay in Cognac is coming to an end. We had lovely walks next to the river with Didi, who also enjoyed her chills to tropical vibes on her grass sofa under the TV screen, but "not gonna lie" -as the Brits would say- the whole Cognac town feels a bit dead aside of the odd fun karaoke and restaurant. Most people seem to stay indoors and the streets are mostly empty, the market a bit blah. So despite our sadness at leaving the loft's sofa, we're quite excited to head off to Andarnos and back to the sea tomorrow.
That was fun, we're off to Andarnos in the Arcachon Basin and back to the seaside !
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Oh wow ... such a beautiful place, Cognac! Love Didi's grass paradise.