Should you collect fine cognac?

Prices for the rarest cognacs still lag those for Scotch whisky. The collectable market for the latter boomed during the era of ultra-low interest rates and, in any case, the whisky market is quite a bit bigger. Scotland exported £5.6 billion worth of whisky in 2023 against almost €3 billion (£2.5 billion) in annual sales for cognac, as of last month’s data. Of that, 97% of cognac is exported – 31% to China. Days earlier, Beijing had retaliated against European Union tariffs of up to 35% on its electric cars by threatening similar taxes on European brandy (of which 99% comes from France – ie, Cognac). Things may yet get worse. “As America and China sharpen the knives over a simmering trade war that threatens to engulf the [EU]… [cognac, that] famed French tipple, faces being caught in the crossfire,” says Henry Samuel in The Telegraph.

But in spite of the gloom (or maybe because of it), prices for rare cognac have been rising in recent years. In 2020, Sotheby’s sold a bottle distilled in 1792 for £118,580 to set the current auction record. And last February, Martell, the oldest of the “big four” auction houses (along with Hennessy, Courvoisier and Rémy Martin) released a dame-jeanne (a large glass flask) of rare cognac, priced at €1 million. It promised to repeat the feat every year. In another sign that the market is maturing nicely, auction house Christie’s recently published a collector’s guide to buying cognac on its website, ahead of the sale of a single bottle of 72-year-old Martell, which fetched £32,500. That’s pretty old as cognacs go.