Drunk in Love with D'Usse

Nobody ever accused Jay-Z of being stupid, or Bacardi either. Even considering that, the marketing plan they hatched seven years ago for D'Usse Cognac is turning out to be a work of genius.

It helps that D'Usse is good Cognac, and it's not just Jay-Z saying so.

"It's great to have an influencer like him," says Philippe Jouhaud, D'Usse sales and marketing director. "But we also need to talk about the liquid. We need people to know that the liquid has a lot of history behind it. It's not like we came from nowhere."

In 2011, Bacardi had been sitting on a moribund Cognac brand, Otard, for nearly 20 years, since acquiring it as a part of a 1993 deal to buy Martini & Rossi. Otard had bounced around with neglectful owners for awhile, having been owned by the British beer company Bass before Martini & Rossi bought it, but the Cognac still had some fans in Europe. However, Otard was not available in the US, and those fans were getting older.

But Otard had a gem of a production house. Martini & Rossi had christened this rambling old castle beside the Charente river Château de Cognac. It's a good place for spirits production because wildly varying humidity in different rooms – it's drier on higher floors and the further back you get from the river, even inside the same building – gives it a unique ability to age brandy at different rates.

And Jay-Z wanted his own Cognac brand. He's a fan of the spirit, having drunk it on stage out of a Grammy award. He met with Bacardi and they created D'Usse.

Jay-Z is best known as a rapper and music producer, but he has also made a lot of money with his design sense. Otard had a stodgy bottle. D'Usse has a strikingly cool bottle, a bold inverted royal scepter of Cognac with a metal double cross on the front that looks mysterious and modern, but is actually an ancient symbol. The bottle perfectly blends bold American style with French tradition.

Could Bacardi get away with putting the same old Otard spirit in the cool new bottle and charging double for it? Possibly, although not overnight. People would have seen through that.

Instead, the change has been gradual. Jouhaud told Wine-Searcher that 75-80 percent of the chateau's production now goes into D'Usse. Just two years ago it was 50 percent and, of course, just seven years ago it was zero percent.

That said, while Otard and D'Usse are made from the same ingredients, the formula is different. And it better be, as D'Usse VSOP costs about 50 percent more than Otard VSOP, and D'Usse XO is one of the most expensive simple XOs in Cognac, costing double what Otard XO fetches. (The major houses all have special-release Cognacs like Hennessy Paradis that scoff from a great height at D'Usse XO's price.)

Michel Casavecchia, the cellar master, is trying to make D'Usse Cognac work in cocktails, especially the VSOP. That seems like an odd use of a more expensive spirit, but it is the way the Cognac market is going these days.

"Two years of additional aging (for the VSOP) give it good complexity," Casavecchia told Wine-Searcher. "For making cocktails, you need something that has aromas to balance the other ingredients. If you don't have enough aromas, your cocktail will be missing something. If you don't have these aromas, you can use any spirit: whiskey, anything. It doesn't even have to be Cognac."

Chateau de Cognac is still buying eaux de vie from the same suppliers.

"Some of them we have been working with for generations," said Casavecchia, 57, who has been cellar master for more than 20 years. "We really look for a specific style of eaux de vie and we stick to that. Distilled with the lees – that is something we are looking for. I don't like anything that is distilled from clear wine. We really think the lees are adding something."

Casavecchia says that more of the older eaux de vie go into Otard, because Otard is generally drunk straight. It's another counterintuitive thing about D'Usse's pricing. There's no age statement, and D'Usse's XO is both one of the most expensive AND one with some of the youngest eaux de vie in it.

And yet ... this is the second time in the last year I've written about D'Usse for Wine-Searcher. The first time was in a roundup of XOs. I wanted to mock D'Usse, for the pricing and marketing reasons mentioned above. But D'Usse XO is terrific.

D'Usse XO is very smooth and rich, with good intensity, orange and golden raisin fruit, and warm spices on a nice long finish. You might fall crazy in love with it (it would help if Beyoncé showed up.)

No frontin': I also have to say that D'Usse VSOP is probably worth its 50 percent price premium. It's nice enough to drink straight; it's also very smooth, with orange fruit and some dried herb notes and milk chocolate on the finish.

D'Usse VSOP is so dark that I suspect it has added caramel, which is not only legal but common in Cognac. A purist wouldn't approve, and maybe I shouldn't. But it's much tastier than some of the more austere VSOP Cognacs I've encountered. Casavecchia didn't say his mission was to pump up the flavor, but it does seem that way.

Now that Casavecchia has created the formula for D'Usse, it's his job to both keep making it taste the same every year – that's how Cognac works – and to start preparing for his successors.

"The life cycle of an eaux de vie is 40 to 80 years," Casavecchia said. "A cellar master can't be there for 80 years. I have to work with what my predecessor left me."

Look at it this way, Jay-Z fans: Casavecchia didn't reinvent Otard. He remixed it.