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In France the first week of September is la rentrée, the return: holidays over, schools back, offices full, everything that stopped in August starting again on the same Monday. This is ours. What happened in the vines, four houses we visited over the summer, the new bottles that landed while you were away, and the Calendar 2026.
The Charente has never picked this early. Harvest usually begins in the last days of September, and in the two hottest recent years, 2011 and 2025, it slipped to the very start of September. This year it began in August, the first August harvest ever recorded in the region and fifteen to twenty days ahead of the ten-year average.
Armagnac broke its own record in the same fortnight, picking before 15 August against a normal start of 25 to 30 August. Nationally the first grapes came in on 16 July in the Corbieres, the earliest vintage in French wine history. The cause was a summer of repeated heat waves on top of a long water shortage.
What it means in the glass will take years to read, because the eaux-de-vie distilled this winter will not be bottled for a long time. What it means today is that the growers we buy from spent August in the vines instead of September.
We spend most of the year driving between estates in the Charente, and we write up every visit. These four came out of this summer.
Mestreau was brought back by Grosperrin. The name disappeared in 1911 and the stocks behind it did not. The cellars at Saintes and Chermignac still hold what the house laid down.
Guy Tanguide et Fils is a Petite Champagne grower who sells almost everything at the door. The casks rest in an old pigeonnier, boulins still in the walls.
Domaine Laurent does not blend across crus. One cru, bottled as it is, distilled on the family's own copper stills. Virginia caught Ludovic on the phone one morning at the end of August. He answered from the tractor, on his way out to start picking.
Maison Dhiersat farms fifty-five hectares of Fins Bois inside a three kilometre radius and distils on three 25 hectolitre Charentais alambics. Marie Dhiersat runs the estate with two other women, which is still rare in Cognac.
Francois Voyer released three single barrels from one village in Grande Champagne, twelve, twenty and twenty-five years, two of them at cask strength. Raison Personnelle bottled two new wood-fired Grande Champagne assemblages and a single cask. And Bache Gabrielsen brought back its American Oak for the tenth anniversary of the bottling, ten years old, finished in American oak, in a limited run.
Two families we have written up in full this summer, from the vineyard to the cellar to the range.
Certified organic since 1998, which in Cognac is close to unheard of at that date. The family distils its own estate fruit and selects grower casks alongside it.
In Angeac-Charente since 1795, holding more than thirty single-harvest vintages. Bottled one harvest at a time, and when a vintage is finished it does not come back.
Twenty-four cognacs from twenty-four different producers, 3cl of each, with a booklet on all Cognacs and the whole calendar experience. The first door opens on 1 December.
