When your job is to make a cognac that tastes the same as the cognac you made last year, and the year before that, and the decade before that, and, hell, the century before that, you might assume that there’s not a whole lot of room for individual expression. Take the gent in question, Baptiste Loiseau, who was appointed Cellar Master of Rémy Martin in 2014, at the age of 34. “It took me seven years beside the previous Cellar Master to understand the style,” he says. “To make the selection of the eau de vie, the selection of the cask, the aging of course, and the final thing you learn is how to make the final blend, to maintain this consistency.”
Ah, consistency. Doesn’t sound too thrilling, right? But even a company that’s been around since 1724 knows that getting ahead in the booze biz in the 21st century requires shaking things up a little — respecting your heritage while trying out new things as well. So the powers that be at Rémy Martin gave Loiseau a unique and, frankly, mind-blowing opportunity. He was given carte blanche to create his own expression, to be released under his own name as a limited edition. And thus, the Carte Blanche a Baptiste Loiseau series was born. The first bottling was released last year; the second, Carte Blanche Merpins (named after the village in which the eau de vie was vatted and aged) has just come out in the U.S., with a worldwide release to follow in 2018.
Was it a lot of pressure to make a cognac that would bear his name? “No, it was fun. It was going back to the tasting notes, it was going back in the cellars to take new samples, and after, being in the tasting room with all these samples, doing a blind tasting and selecting what I really wanted to highlight as the superiority of Fine Champagne (the region from which the grapes that make Rémy’s cognacs come).... So I was really lucky.”
Carte Blanche Merpins is a blend aged a minimum of 27 years and bottled at cask strength of 44.1% alcohol by volume. Aged in older refill vats, it’s not nearly as tannic as you’d expect from such an old cognac — it’s still fresh and lively, with lots of wintry spices like cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg bringing to mind a fruitcake, in the best possible way. It starts off sweet and fruity, and finishes dry, reminiscent of a sherry, with a long, gentle spicy tingle. It’s delicious. It doesn’t taste quite like anything else in the Rémy portfolio. And it’s limited to 9,650 bottles, a mere 2,000 of them in the States, at $500 each. The good news is that it seems like the Carte Blanche series will be ongoing. The bad news is that each release is a unique blend. So miss out on Carte Blanche Merpins now, and miss out forever. No pressure. I’m just saying.