'There's still so much untapped potential for cognac in China' - Camus Cognac CEO Cyril Camus speaks to Global Drinks Intel

Ask Cyril Camus (below) where he lives and he’ll tell you his home is in Shanghai, the office is in Cognac — and he’s usually somewhere in between. When we meet (virtually) after having missed each other in London, the Camus PR reckons he’s probably still somewhere in Europe, but it turns out that he’s on the east coast of the US.

When you’re the fifth-generation CEO of cognac’s biggest wholly family-owned business, clocking up the air miles is inevitable.

Camus has lived in China for 30 years, during which time cognac has established itself as the country’s favourite imported high-end spirit. For its part, China has played a vital role in the evolution of the company’s portfolio, in particular the house style of “aromatic intensity”.

“That notion of intensity came from my experience of Chinese baijiu,” Camus explains. “You pour one small glass of, say, Moutai in a restaurant, and within a few minutes the whole room is filled with the aroma of baijiu. That’s what started this journey to become the most aromatic cognac on the market.”

Fruit-forward eaux-de-vie

When Camus entered the business, he asked its customers what made a great cognac, and they said its intensity of floral and fruity aromas without too much oak. “We’ve spent the past 25-plus years reviewing and reworking every aspect of production,” he says. The primary goals? High levels of terpenes (floral aromas) and esters (fruity notes).

Today, Camus believes, his cognacs have at least double the aromatic intensity of any other on the market, and sometimes as much as seven times more. He ascribes this to the house’s penchant for the fruit-forward eaux-de-vie of the small Borderies cru (Camus is the largest vineyard owner there), and its championing of the folle blanche grape variety.

While folle blanche only accounts for 0.5% of the total cognac vineyard, it comprises 5% – and rising – of Camus’s plantings: as the company replants, 10% of new vines are folle blanche.

Meanwhile, Camus’s patented distillation method extracts highly aromatic compounds from the ‘heads’ – the first unstable 25 litres of the distillation cycle, which is usually discarded. “Some of the compounds are pretty horrible, but some are amazing, because the concentration of esters is out of this world,” Camus says.

Breaking cognac’s creativity ceiling

This transformation of Camus in flavour terms has been accompanied by an evolving approach to luxury. The house was always skewed to the more-premium VSOP and XO classifications but, says Camus: “We have wanted to push that even more and break the ceiling of how far cognac can go in terms of creativity.”

The company established Les Ateliers Camus, bringing in-house ancillary crafts associated with luxury: glass engraving, bottle dressing, label printing, leather cutting and sewing. “That’s really allowed us to harness creativity at a level that I think has never been seen in the industry, and apply it to the exploration of different themes and concepts,” says Camus.

“We used to be in the same field as Louis XIII or Richard Hennessy – that kind of rare, amazing cognac that you put on the market year after year. But there are constraints, because you can only go as high in terms of greatness as you can go again the next year, and the year after that.”

Liberated from those constraints, Camus cellar master Julie Landreau has created a series of one-off concept cognacs, released every two to three years, with only 300 to 1,000 bottles available, and priced at EUR6,000–EUR13,000 (US$6,540–$7,630). The latest collection, Voyages Extraordinaires, centres on the fiction of the 19th-Century French writer Jules Verne.

The first release, L’Île Cognac (below), is a GBP60,000 ($78,550) blend of four eaux-de-vie: one from Borderies, two from Bons Bois (both folle blanche), and a 65-year-old Grande Champagne, presented on a tasting table with three types of glass and a tasting book.

Nor is that the apex of the Camus luxury pyramid; these are the private commissions – one-of-one iterations created by the Ateliers and Landreau, often to mark a special occasion, and based on extensive research into the recipient’s life, hobbies and personality. “That’s taken us into really amazing areas of creativity,” says Camus. “It allows us to explore new materials and design styles, and that, in turn, influences the other things we do.”

The approach makes Landreau an atypical – and extremely busy – cognac cellar master. “Whereas a master blender might be creating a new blend every two to five years, Julie is creating anything from 20 to 30 blends a year,” says Camus. “She has developed a skill that I think is unmatched in the region.”

‘Innovation and diversity are a long-term concern’

Unmatched in cognac, but that rapid cadence of innovation would be familiar to the master distillers at The Macallan, Glenfiddich or The Glenlivet, who typically have dozens of projects in play at any time. Is cognac being stifled by its lack of innovation?

“Frankly, cognac has become quite monotonous in terms of taste diversity,” says Camus. “As a result, people own only one bottle of cognac, where they might own five or six bottles of single malt. But we have that range of organoleptic characters – we have that diversity.”

Camus is mystified by the fact that, while cognac producers are allowed to ‘finish’ their products in, say, port or bordeaux casks, they can’t advertise that fact on the label. So will the rules be changed?

“I do hope in the current market conditions there will be less opposition [to that],” says Camus. “Is there an interest in developing finishes? We have to let the market tell us, and open the door to more experimentation.

“Innovation and diversity are a very long-term concern. It can be a solution to a downward sales trend. Obviously, that wasn’t a problem until two years ago, because demand was outstripping supply, and our main concern was how we could meet that demand.”

In the US, soaring sales during the Covid-19 pandemic conspired with logistical pressures to create supply constraints, which in turn fuelled price rises. More recently, overstocked inventories and softer demand have created the kind of slump that cognac hasn’t seen in a generation.

“Very clearly, prices got too high,” says Camus. “There are other factors, but I think the main one is that we priced ourselves out of the market. Pricing is now being adjusted – it’s a pretty violent adjustment, pretty brutal, but we will find the right balance again.

“This is where it gets difficult to keep pushing innovation. When things are going very well, there is less appetite for it. But we need to increase the diversity in the tasting experience, because other categories are doing it.”

China’s ‘untapped potential’

Talking of other categories, Camus joined forces late last year with baijiu producer GuJingGong to build Guqi (above), a $30m whisky distillery in Bozhou, China. The stated aim – with echoes of the Camus house style – is to produce “the world’s most aromatic whiskies”, with production possibly starting before the end of this year.

The idea is to combine the expertise of three countries: France for blending and maturation, Scotland for distillation and China for fermentation.

“Chinese baijiu companies are way ahead of anyone else in the world with their fermentation techniques,” Camus says. “It’s the only country I can think of where you can get a bachelor’s degree in fermentation. We want to do a very distinctively Chinese whisky, and aromatic intensity is key to that.”

As we wait for the first Guqi whisky, there is cognac’s future to consider, at a time when its two main markets – China and the US – are beset by challenges, and few countries appear ready to step forward and fill the gap.

For all that, Camus points out that cognac consumption in China remains highly regional – largely confined to the Guangdong and Fujian provinces. And this, at least, gives him optimism for the future of the category that he has spent the past few decades travelling the world to promote.

“Cognac represents 60% or so of the value of imported spirits in China, but only 2%–3% of the total,” he says. “You ask me where does cognac go next? I believe that, for cognac, the new China is China.

“There is still so much untapped potential.”