Martell: Inside Cognac's Oldest Distilling House
In the town of Cognac, on the banks of the Charente River in southwestern France, a distilling house has been filling oak barrels since 1715. Martell is the oldest of the great Cognac houses, predating its better-known rivals by decades. Its founder, Jean Martell, arrived from the Channel Island of Jersey and built a trading business that would come to define an entire spirits category. Three centuries later, the house still draws its character from the same stretch of French countryside, and its name remains one of the most recognized in the world of brandy.
A Merchant from Jersey
Jean Martell was born on Jersey, a small island in the English Channel with long-standing trade ties to the French mainland. He settled in the town of Cognac in the early eighteenth century and began exporting local brandies to markets in England and beyond, using his island connections to reach buyers across the Channel. The company he founded in 1715 predates Hennessy, Rémy Martin, and Courvoisier, the other houses commonly grouped with Martell as Cognac's "big four." Across three centuries, ownership of the house has changed hands, but the name on the label and the address in Cognac have not.
That founding date matters more than a simple marketing claim. It places Martell's origins in a period when the Cognac trade was still largely organized around individual merchants shipping brandy out of the port towns along the Charente to buyers in Britain, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Many of those early trading houses did not survive the upheavals of the following century, including the French Revolution and the phylloxera crisis that devastated European vineyards in the late 1800s. Martell's survival through those disruptions, while continuing to operate from the same town, is part of why it is still described as the oldest of the major Cognac houses.
The Town of Cognac and Its Vineyards
Cognac is both a town and the wider region around it, spread across the Charente and Charente-Maritime départements. The vineyards that supply its brandy houses are divided into named growing zones, or crus, based on soil and distance from the town: Grande Champagne and Petite Champagne closest in, then Borderies, Fins Bois, Bons Bois, and the outer Bois Ordinaires. The soil in this part of France is notably chalky, a trait long associated with elegance in the resulting spirit. Martell has historically leaned more heavily on grapes from the Borderies cru, a small growing area northwest of the town, along with Fins Bois fruit, giving its brandies a rounder, nuttier, more floral character than houses that favor Grande Champagne above all else.
This reliance on Borderies is often cited as the clearest thread running through Martell's house style. Grande Champagne, the cru most prized for long aging potential, tends to produce eaux-de-vie that need decades to soften fully. Borderies, by contrast, is prized for a softer, rounder profile with notes often described as violet, iris, or toasted almond, qualities that show through in Martell's blends even at younger ages. Because Borderies is a small cru with limited plantings, sourcing enough of it to anchor a major international brand is itself a long-term commitment to the growers working that particular patch of Charente countryside.
From Grape to Spirit: Double Distillation
Cognac begins as a light, acidic white wine, made almost entirely from the Ugni Blanc grape, which is ill-suited to drinking on its own but well suited to distillation. That base wine is distilled twice in traditional copper pot stills known locally as alembic charentais, a method required by the Cognac appellation rules. The first pass produces a cloudy, low-alcohol liquid called the brouillis; the second, more careful distillation isolates the heart of the run, the eau-de-vie that will eventually become Cognac. This double-distillation process, still carried out in small batches, is one of the most tightly regulated parts of Cognac production, and Martell's stills follow the same essential shape used across the region for generations.
By regulation, the spirit coming off the still cannot simply be called Cognac until it has aged in oak for a minimum period and originates from grapes grown within the strictly defined appellation boundaries. Distillation itself must also finish by a fixed date each year, meaning the pot stills across the region, Martell's included, run in a concentrated seasonal window following the grape harvest rather than year-round. That seasonal rhythm, tied to the wine harvest each autumn, has shaped the working life of Cognac's distilling towns for centuries and still governs when the stills at Martell are lit each year.
Aging in Oak and the Cellar Master's Craft
Once distilled, the clear eau-de-vie is transferred into French oak barrels, where it begins to take on color, tannin, and aromatic complexity over years of slow evaporation and interaction with the wood. Barrels made from oak grown in French forests, including the Tronçais forest prized for its tight grain, are commonly used across the Cognac industry for aging. At Martell, as at other houses, a cellar master, known in French as the chef de cave, is responsible for tasting and blending eaux-de-vie of different ages and origins into a consistent house style. The oldest and rarest reserves are typically set aside in a special cellar, sometimes called a paradis, where they may rest for decades before being used, sparingly, in the house's finest blends.
Blending is where a Cognac house's identity is really decided. A finished bottling is rarely the product of a single barrel or a single year; instead, the cellar master draws on eaux-de-vie of varying ages, from different crus, tasting and combining them until the result matches the house's established profile. This is a skill passed down over long careers, often within the same cellar for decades, and it is one reason large Cognac houses place such emphasis on continuity in the cellar master's role. Consistency across vintages, rather than variation from batch to batch, is generally the goal, so that a bottle of a given expression tastes recognizably similar whether it was blended this year or a decade earlier.
The Range: From VS to Cordon Bleu
Martell's product range spans the standard Cognac age categories used across the industry, from VS, the youngest classification, through VSOP to older XO expressions. Within that structure, Martell is particularly associated with Cordon Bleu, a blend first created in 1912 and still one of the house's signature expressions today, prized for the fuller, spicier profile that comes from its Borderies-driven blend. In recent years the house has also released Blue Swift, a Cognac finished for a period in American bourbon casks, an example of how established houses have experimented with cask finishing while keeping their core traditional range intact.
These categories are not unique to Martell; VS, VSOP, and XO are industry-wide classifications defined by minimum aging periods and used by every Cognac house. What differentiates one house's VS from another's is the underlying blend, the crus drawn on, and the style the cellar master is aiming for. Because Martell's blends lean on Borderies and Fins Bois rather than Grande Champagne, tasting notes for its range tend to emphasize dried fruit, toasted nuts, and floral top notes over the more austere, slow-building character associated with Grande Champagne-heavy houses. Cordon Bleu in particular is often used as a reference point for that house style, since it has remained in continuous production for well over a century with only gradual changes to its recipe.
Ownership and a Global Market
Like most of the surviving Cognac houses, Martell has passed through several corporate owners over its history, eventually becoming part of Pernod Ricard, the French spirits group, which also owns brands including Chivas Regal and Absolut. Despite these ownership changes, production has remained centered in and around the town of Cognac, and the house continues to rely on grower networks across the crus that supply its blends. Cognac as a category has long depended heavily on export markets, with Asia, and China in particular, becoming an important market for aged Cognac over the past few decades, a shift that has shaped how houses like Martell position their older, more expensive expressions.
The wider Cognac region has always been shaped by trade beyond France's borders; long before Chinese and other Asian markets became central to the category's fortunes, the eighteenth and nineteenth century trade routes that built houses like Martell ran mainly to Britain, Ireland, and northern Europe. That export-first orientation is part of what distinguishes Cognac from many other French wine and spirits categories that historically served a largely domestic market. It also means that a house's fortunes, Martell's included, have long been tied as much to shifts in overseas demand and trade policy as to conditions in the vineyards of the Charente.
Explore on the map
Martell's home sits in one of the most tightly regulated and closely watched spirits regions on earth, a short stretch of the Charente valley responsible for centuries of French brandy production. To see where the house is located relative to the crus that supply it, and to browse other distilleries and spirits producers across France and beyond, open the map and explore the region for yourself.