Baron de Lustrac are specialists in releasing fantastic Armagnac from vintages that date back many decades. This particular release is a 1967 vintage, which was distilled in the same year that Cool Hand Luke was released in cinemas.
Distillery Information
Armagnac Baron De Lustrac was unique among the 12 armagnac houses I visited in the fall of 2014. Most houses grow grapes or make wine or distill wine or age brandy, but Baron De Lustrac, or more accurately the company Millésimes et Tradition, they mostly bottle up single-vineyard, single-grape, single-vintage armagnacs that have been stored on the property where they were distilled. Sometimes they do help with the on-site aging, performing tasks for the cask producers like aerating the brandy as is done in armagnac. The process seems weird but in armagnac small producers are often very, very small and may only make a barrel each year. Baron de Lustrac has made a few vintages that are vintage blends from different vineyards, but this seems like the exception to their usual single-single-single scheme. The property that I visited is really a bottling facility. Here they blend, filter, bring down to proof, and bottle by hand in a two-room garage. All the bottling is on-demand, so when someone calls in an order that’s when they go to work. On site, there aren’t a mass of barrels rolled in from the farms where it’s made (armagnac barrels don’t move around much), but they’re transferred to plastic containers to bring to here. Some are very small containers, as a customer may have requested a single special bottle from their birth year, etc.
