Armagnac, cognac’s less-celebrated cousin, boasts big, irresistible, fruity flavours, and gives you much more bang for your buck

The seemingly staid world of armagnac was well and truly disrupted earlier this year by the arrival of a brand called Hogsworth that blends bourbon whiskey with brandy from Gascony. It’s the creation of American entrepreneur Raj Bhakta, who in 2020 began buying up aged armagnac, and the name is a mischievous dig at his former company WhistlePig, a rye whiskey distiller in Vermont that he left in 2019. As you can imagine, Bhakta has ruffled a few feathers by combining rare 42-year-old brandies with young bourbons – and that’s even before we get on to the accompanying sales pitch video, which can only be described as Trumpian.

Dog’s dinner or pig’s ear, the idea behind Hogsworth does point to something interesting going on in the spirits world: mature whisky, be it single malt scotch or bourbon, can be extremely valuable. Armagnac, by contrast, isn’t. If you’re looking for a 40th birthday present, you could buy, say, a 1984 Delord armagnac for £125.65 (from Brandy Classics, 40%), or you could go very large indeed and splash out nearly £5,000 on a bottle of Glenfarclas Winter Cask 1984 (Master of Malt, 47.1%).