Lighting a Fire Under Your Glass

Brandy doesn’t get a lot of attention. Great brandy is magnificent. It’s made in small batches, from grapes most people have never heard from, and can cost a small fortune. I had the good luck of tasting a bottle of stunning Armagnac Raf discovered on a trip to Paris.

Thanks to the amazing selection of a local store in San Francisco that specialized in the stuff, I was able to buy my own bottle for triple the price Raf paid for it in France. But it was worth every drop. Telling you about it now would be meaningless, since it was a vintage brandy, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t a drop of it available on the market for any price. Wine and booze can be a real bummer.

The truth is that I don’t even drink a lot of good brandy, much less the great stuff, these days. But as winter begins to come on, and people start cozying up with drinks by the fire, there is something about brandy you really should know.

But first I need to provide a little context.

In college I liked to drink brandy out of a snifter. There was something about it that just felt very sophisticated. I even liked the way the bartenders would pour a drink into the snifter. They would lay the glass down on its side, and pour the booze into the sideways bowl, until it reached the rim.

In theory a snifter does the following things:
1)    Forces you to hold it by the bowl (versus the stem) which gently heats the contents inside
2)    Warmed, volatile aroma elements get concentrated in the glass, with only a small opening to escape through, allowing you to deeply appreciate the nose.

Now that I’m older I prefer my brandy in fluted tulip-shaped stemmed glasses. The truth is that good brandy doesn’t need to have its aroma coaxed out with heat. And while the small opening of a snifter may be a good place to stick your nose, some are so small that during the critical moment of tasting, one’s nose may miss the snifter entirely.

There is also some infernal device forged in the pits of hell that will suspend a brandy snifter over a flame to speed its warming.

NEVER DO THIS. If you’ve done it in the past, don’t do it again. If you are thinking about doing it in the future, I urge you to reconsider. You might like your brandy warmed up a bit. Fine. Warm the glass with your hands. If you are particularly cold blooded, you can preheat the glass with hot water before you pour in the booze.

But heating booze over a flame is never the answer.

First, you need to consider the integrity of the experience. Fire artificially inflates the aromatic elements of a lesser spirit. If you want more aromatic compounds in your brandy, I suggest buying a better bottle. Second, you should consider the integrity of the spirit. When you put a snifter over a flame, you are effectively cooking the brandy and evaporating off all that alcohol the distiller worked so hard to get in the bottle in the first place.

The biggest joke of all is that brandy is warming all on its own. So as the nights get cooler, go past your comfort zone, and consider trying a nice brandy by the fire. Just make sure that these two great comforts of winter stay far enough away from each other.