Sniff ‘N' The Tears

To make your home bar really cool, start raiding your grandfather’s cabinet

- Anish Irivedi

Find a snifter. Not an easy task, since you probably don’t have one handy, and you can’t remember what you did with the ones your grandfather owned. Delicately pour a thimbleful of amber-coloured liquid into the glass. Cup said glass in your hand for close to 10 minutes. Swirl. Bury your nose in it. Sniff. Take a sip. Savour the burning sensation trickling down the back of your throat. That’s how you drink cognac.

What a crock of crap. If that’s the only way you’re knocking back brandy, you need to grow up. Mix it, serve it on the rocks with a twist, blend it – there are hundreds of ways you can liven up this old man’s drink and impress your friends. It’s time to teach your grandfather a few things.

For the history buff, brandy is the product of distilling wine to produce spirit. The first recorded distillation goes back to 1411, and actually happened in Armagnac. Cognac didn’t begin to produce its now-most famous product until 1549. The word “brandy” itself, derived from the Dutch term “brandwijn”, meaning “burnt wine”, only entered common parlance 10 years later. The great houses you now see on shelves, Martell, Rémy Martin, Hennessy and Otard among them, were set up in the 1700s. And that’s when the marketing really began.