1 Bottle 1 Story: Domaine de Jouatmaou 2014

Nine years old, the age of a child who still has everything to discover in life but who is already finding a way to imitate adults. We could have told you about a colossus from the previous century (and that will come), about an outdated eau-de-vie, but it is indeed a new breath that is at stake here: more precisely a youthful spirit which, despite its diaphanous existence, carries on its shoulders almost a century of family tradition...

This story is that of Nelly Lacave, who accepted the responsibility of a lifetime in 2014. Like her parents Bernard and Marie-Lise before her, and eighty years earlier her grandfather Roger Lacave, that year she took it seriously to continue the family adventure. From 1934 to 2014, obviously.

On November 16, 2014, the crystalline ink of Baco draws the first chapter of the rest of his life. From observer, she passes at this (fateful) moment to author of eau-de-vie, placing an important part of her future in the expert hands of the Mogni family, traveling distiller from father to son.

All the hours spent in the vineyards (and outside) finally come out of the still, as much as from his eyes which cannot retain all the emotional charge of the moment. It will be a single-varietal Armagnac, 100% Baco, as is obvious. It was discovered by a local schoolteacher (François Baco) who was passionate about viticulture and whose work saved a large part of the French vineyard after the phylloxera crisis.

The distillate and its 52°, barely escaped from the gleaming Armagnac still, is meticulously housed/nestled in a new oak barrel, which will join its elders in the sublime cellar located under the house where Nelly grew up. It sits there, seventy-five years after his grandfather Roger's first vintage (a 1939) and forty years after his father Bernard's 1974. If only mycelium could talk...

This 2014 vintage was suggested to us by Nelly. It was even a mystery before receiving the package. So it does us a little something to see this Armagnac coming from its very first barrel, the very one which hides the first chapter of its history. (And to think that it is currently carrying out its tenth campaign...) It is yours from now on and you are in the confidence and in the possibility of tasting it for -all- that it is.

Cheers and a happy new year to everyone !