A Conversation with Martinne Lafitte

Domaine Boigneres. I may have mentioned it (54 times). To my mind, it is clearly one of the finest brandy houses in all the world. It's offices... Right in the quaint village of Labastide D'Armagnac. Nice! I had the Bouglons call Martinne Lafitte and ask if I could stop by. She had some schedule to keep, which confused me, because nothing seems to go very fast in that part of the world. Nonetheless, she said I could come by at 4:30 PM. So I did. Funny enough, I showed up directly after visiting Chateau Briat. I had already had a few full servings of brandy and maybe a small glass (or two) of wine. Luckily for me, I made it safely back to Prada and was within a short walk (everything is within a short walk in labastide d'armagnac) from Boigneres. It turns out the vineyards are some 9km away from the actual office, which is simply Martinne Lafitte's house. I showed up and there was a gardener outside who pointed me to the front door. When Martinne showed up, she said in her extremely thick French accent "Ah, you want to taste!" Oh boy... It could have turned into a really rough time if I weren't concentrating so hard on trying to fumble my way through french and english as she did the same. Her english is stronger than my french. Thank God.

Out comes bottle #1, 1989. Oh my god, fantastic. We sit and chat, and I ask her everything I can possibly think of about brandy, whiskey, wine, beer, france, spain, her football interests, etc... It turns out, she actually doesn't know THAT much about brandy. What she knows is how to make a supremely good one. I suppose, when you have at your disposal (literally) hundreds upon hundreds of bottles of the finest ever made you don't need to worry about knowing everything about everyone else's brandies. No worries, she knows armagnac and cognac pretty damn well, and has favorable opinions about Spanish brandy. Good enough for me.

Second taste, 1984. Five years better than 1989.
Third tast, 1981. My birthyear. Apparently 1981 was a better year than I remembered...
Fourth taste, 1979. This was the disappointment of the lot. Basically, that was a really bad year for grapes in Armagnac. They only had a good yield of ugni blanc grapes. In case you don't know, Ugni Blanc are the grapes from which Cognac is primarly made. It is part of the big difference in the styles. Ugni Blanc are mostly boring, flat grapes, that distill well in pot stills. In column stills they are used to fill in gaps in other grapes. But to throw them into a column still alone, and allow that to be 1979's brandy. Well, it wasn't as good as 1981.

Fifth Taste, 1976. Complete obliteration is upon me, but I'm still hanging in there letting my taste buds have the ride of their life and making my brain work to keep up my french. At this point, Martinne started telling me a story about a man who'd grown folle blanche (armagnac's pride of grape varietals) in california and had made an armagnac style brandy. She said it tasted good, but there was no terroir. I was amused, sort of. I do NOT have the sophistication to taste the difference between distilled grapes on the basis of location. Varietal, sometimes, location, definitely not. This brandy, however, might be the single best beverage that has ever run across my lips. That's saying a lot. It could be that I was actually getting toward inebriation, or the fact that I'd just tasted a "disappointing" brandy, but my god it was good.

Sixth taste, 1975. Good by cruel world. Thirty four years in a barrel. That's a lot of dedication! Well, it shows. Apparently 1975 was NEARLY as good a year as 1976 for boigneres' grapes. I still think the 1976 was slightly better, but perhaps Domaine Boigneres 1975 is the SECOND best beverage that has ever run across my lips.

At the end, Martinne, told me she had an appointment with the vet at 6. She has a very old, very cute cat, with cancer. Poor baby! She's a cat lover too. Totally awesome. Thanks Martinne for the chat and the brandy. The effect was not lost on me!