Things are beginning to warm up nicely. It's late October and people have been breathing clouds of fog into the crisp autumn air all morning. Now shafts of sunlight are beginning to hit the cobbles, creep along the half-timbered houses and animate the crowd assembled in the village square for a fête.
We are in Labastide d'Armagnac, an hour and a half down the road from Bordeaux in southwest France where, every year, over the last weekend in October, l'Armagnac en Fête celebrates the end of the grape harvest and the beginning of the distilling season for the world's oldest eau de vie.
All the ingredients for a proper country knees-up appear to be in place in the village square. This is the ancient domain of Gascony, France's poster region for the good life with its rolling hills, terracotta-roofed stone houses, country-table cooking and its connection to the soil through grape and game. In the square, groups huddle around vintners' stands, sampling the wines and spirits from local vines; a male-voice choir of former rugby players is belting out ballads in front of the town hall; people slurp down bowls of garbure – the local vegetable broth – at communal tables under the colonnades; and pyramids of preserves and conserves rise up from trestles presided over by ruddy-faced farmers. The local gastronomy is rightly celebrated for its rustic style. But it is also home to two of the world's most renowned and, some would argue, refined, ingredients: oak-aged armagnac and the controversial foie gras.
Everyone knows how foie gras is made and you take your stand on it. The process of making armagnac is much more discreet, and is almost as complex as the cumbersome-looking machine that distills it. One of these – an alambic – sits in the corner of the village square for all comers to inspect. It resembles an early prototype of Stephenson's Rocket, a pair of copper boilers and a network of pipes on wheels.
Even now, mobile stills like this are towed through country lanes and rented out to vineyards and farms – rather like combine harvesters – to distill their grapes into eau de vie, which is then left to mature in barrels made from local oak.
The production of armagnac has remained traditional and artisanal – there's a single distillation from four typical varieties of grapes and no sugars or sulphites are allowed to be added. In his culinary reminiscence, Memories of Gascony, master chef Pierre Koffmann recalls how peasant farmers, like his grandfather in the 1950s, would hire a local bouilleur, whose alambic was drawn by a pair of cows, to make their rations of armagnac – they were allowed 20 litres per household back then.
It hasn't always been seen as a posh person's tipple, and when you drive through the countryside of the Armagnac appellation – which stretches from the departement of the Gers to the Landes – you still see farms advertising armagnac alongside the less-refined floc de Gascogne, which is a mixture of newly pressed grapes and young armagnac.
To make quality armagnac, the eau de vie has to be left in oak barrels for anything from four to 30 years until it turns gold, so it's an investment for the producers and the buyers. Bottles of the famous Francis Darroze armagnac from Roquefort, for example, can cost from £35 for an eight-year-old to £600 and upwards for an 80-year-old. But, as his son Marc Darroze says, you're not exactly going to chuck the stuff back. "You mustn't jump on armagnac. You have to reflect upon it. It is a mixture of gentleness and violence."
That's a pretty accurate description. It's aggressive stuff – around 40% volume – and I'm not getting those "top notes of cinnamon, leather, vanilla or white chocolate" from my first tasting. What I am getting is a fire down the hole – which is a pleasant enough sensation on such a cold day.
The flame that today lights the fires under stills that have produced armagnac in Gascony for more than 700 years is lit at the heart of Labastide D'Armagnac, and passes through village fêtes all over Gascony during November. It's rather like the Olympic torch going on a booze run, and it is accompanied by musketeers on horseback. Gascony was the birthplace of the Comte d'Artagnan, the captain of the king's guard, who inspired Alexandre Dumas to write his swashbuckling novel, The Three Musketeers.
There are more than 300 producers of brandy in the Armagnac appellation, and many of them are small-scale, family-run affairs. As chance would have it, one of these producers, the Montesquiou family, who own the Domaine d'Espérance, are believed to be distant relations of d'Artagnan. It's too good an opportunity to pass up, so I drive west through a landscape upon which stillness and silence have descended – the fields of sandy-clay soil have been ploughed and there are only russet and gold leaves left on the black strings of the vines.
I am met at the gates of the estate by Jean-Louis Montesquiou, who can trace his family roots in the region back to the 10th century. He shows me around vast cellars stacked to the rafters with 400-litre oak barrels, and high to the heavens with the smell of the evaporating spirit – the natural wastage in the armagnac process is known as la part des anges (the angels' share).
Jean-Louis is a charming and bookish soul, who couldn't be more different to his rapier-thrusting ancestor. Armagnac, I'm reminded, is a mixture of gentleness and violence, and I proceed to get drunk. One for all and all for one!
Essentials
EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies to Bordeaux or Toulouse from £28.99 one-way, or go by train from London to Agen through loco2.com from £61 one-way. Car hire in France, through sixt.co.uk, costs from £29.43 a day. Stay at Côté Remparts, Condom (cote-remparts.com). Rooms cost from €83 for two. For more information on armagnac, go to armagnac.fr. For more information on France, go to franceguide.com
