I often tell people that once you get far enough down the rabbit hole of understanding spirits, you realize that spending a whole hell of a lot of money on something doesn’t necessarily get you an outright better product, but it does get you something different.
Granted, sometimes the only way to taste that difference is to pay for the extra time and attention. If you want to taste what a two decades-old scotch has to offer after having been rested in a high-quality sherry barrel, be prepared to part with a C-note or two. Additionally, if any liquor is so cheap that it comes in a plastic jug, its a good warning that it will slap you around.
This brings us to Cognac Park: about a year ago, I had the opportunity to try a tasting set with six different offerings from the distillery. To my surprise, my two favorites were the least expensive and the second most expensive bottles in their lineup. The Park XO is a subject for another day, but I did want to talk about what a surprise the “Carte Blanche” was (basically, their entry-level “VS” brandy).
“If you have any way to snag a bottle of Cognac Park’s Carte Blanche, given that it’s a smaller-scale producer, I’m confident it will become a new favorite.”
If you spend more than $100 on a bottle of Cognac, most of the time the tasting notes will have words like “rich,” or “luxurious,” or “decadent.” It is the kind of sipping experience that recalls Christmas evenings. These bottles are often a reward for a job well done, or a way to show someone you really care about them. And all of that sounds great, no?
But it’s hard for me to view Cognac Park’s Carte Blanche as straight up “lesser-than” bottle when compared to those cognacs that are “rich” in every sense of the word. What a good, young cognac has to offer (if done as well as Park has here) is a kind of freshness and vibrancy that can be equally wonderful. To pick just one word – the Carte Blanche is wonderfully bright.
The Carte Blanche starts with an aroma that’s equal parts floral and fresh fruit. It’s hard to pin down exact varieties of flowers – to me there’s a wisp of jasmine here – but there’s oodles of peach, nectarine, and orange of the candied variety. There’s also some appreciable barrel influence in the form of some anise and clove, to add just a little bit of spice.
This all naturally sets the tone for the taste, which starts with a little tease of salinity before it really just explodes into all of those aforementioned fruits, along with some boozy Korean pear and a bit of a tea-like note. The finish again carries those tastes forward, leaving you with a little bit of a tannic exit, but the length of time you’ll still be tasting nectarine and orange is delightfully bonkers.
And by the way: this stuff swims excellently. The Carte Blanche is good to go right out of the bottle, but sipped neat I found it just a little bit more bitter and compressed in what it had to offer. A few ice cubes or a splash of water really makes this a far more expansive spirit with flavor to burn. Normally, most distillers say to pour their entry-level products over ice as a way to set expectations—it’s a suggestion for tasters to turn down the volume of the spirit, lest they get hit with the icky parts of the tasting experience at full blast. Here, however, the ice doesn’t simply make the Carte Blanche more genteel. I think it absolutely improves the experience, and my own tasting notes are based on a little dilution.
Let me also note that while this is technically the cheapest of the Cognac Park lineup, it’s still a quality Cognac, so expect a street price of about $30 to $40 a bottle. That’s certainly not personal pan pizza cheap, but it’s on the same affordability tier as a middling single malt scotch, or even most entry-level “VSOP” products from Remy, Hennessy, Martell, or Courvoisier. (I.e., the “big four” Cognac producers.)
And for something costing below $40? Forgive the pun, but you’ll likely give yourself Carte Blanche to throw it in the cart as a fairly low-risk purchase. Supposing you do, I think you’ll agree there’s just so much that’s excellent about this. I think the Carte Blanche blows out anything in its price range, and obliterates a lot of products twice (or egads, even three times) Cognac Park’s asking price. Some readers might have a challenge sourcing Cognac from a smaller-scale distiller, but if you have any way to snag a bottle of this, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. I’m confident it will become a new favorite.
