Marcadier Barbot MB XO Prestige Cognac

The nose is quite expressive and shows aromas of soft caramel, toffee, sultana raisins, apricot, cocoa, vanilla, orange peel, oak and almonds. The palate is more pretty than powerful with a flavor set that marries elements of toffee, orange, golden raisin and oak spice notes. D&M Tasting Notes

Before we get into the history and particulars of the Marcadier and Barbot family, we wanted to chat a bit about the band around the bottom of the bottle: Family Tradition Cognac. The story goes that, back in the summer of 2001, the The Matthew Skoller Band played the Blues Passions Festival in Cognac. There, Matthew’s brother Larry (guitarist) met a young local woman by the name of Nadège Maurin. Larry was quite smitten from this single encounter and after a long distance courtship moved to Cognac in 2002. Larry and Nadège were soon married, and jointly decided that the itinerant life of a musician was not how they wanted to spend their time. So, they started to use her local knowledge to find very small scale farmers - producers that had heretofore been pretty much sold at the French equivalent of farmer’s markets. Matthew was back in Chicago and agreed to help Nadège and Larry bring their unique small scale finds to the US. We are glad they did so as we have been enjoying a number of these producers from Frevrier, Jean Luc Pasquet, and Raison Personelle to now Marcadier Barbot.

For such a small operation, Marcadier Barbot seems to have quite a confusing set of names associated with it. Marcel Marcadier (the name of the previous company) had two children. When it came time for Marcel to step back from day to day operations, Serge Marcadier and his sister Dany Barbot decided to highlight the co-equal nature of their partnership and appended Dany’s married name to the business. This was not the first career for Dany– she worked as a school teacher for over two decades before rejoining the family’s labors. Her son Frederic has also begun working at the domaine– bringing it to three generations that are in all likelihood on the property at any given moment. The domaine’s proper name is the Combe de Bussac, and they are located in the tiny hamlet of La Pible a few kilometers outside of Segonzac– recognized as the ‘Capital of Grande Champagne.’ This family hustles and bustles- they run a bed and breakfast and even will offer tours of their vineyards in a 1943 US Army Jeep for 2.50 Euros per person.

(This calls to mind a statement from a friend that lives in Mendocino– no one simply has one job but rather two or three in various seasons.) Back to the work at the domaine, as of this writing, they sell the vast majority of their harvest to the large houses - around 90% is sold off every year, mostly to Remy Martin. The remaining portion of their harvest they keep to distill and age themselves. As they explained to a Belgium newspaper in 2018, they see educating the public as an important part of their yearly work. In the winter, they welcome visitors to come while they do their yearly distillation of the previous year’s wine harvest. As Frederick Barbot told a Belgian magazine: "Many people think that cognac is not made from grapes. They imagine that it is perhaps like whisky.” From the tour of the vineyards to the still room and finally the cellar, when asked which he thought people reacted to the most, Alain Barbot, Frederick Barbot's father said, "[it] is to smell the cognac directly in the barrel. People like that!" The XO we have for you this month spent an average of 15 years in barrel where it was gradually reduced with water to 40% alcohol by volume. Michael Kennel, D&M