On Hennessy transitioning away from family ownership

Well, the main change, of course—and I don't disapprove—is that firms which once were family firms run by members of the family have disappeared. Mostly now, big names are part of big groups. The H in LVMH is the Hennessy name and we still have members of the family there because there's two of us working in the firm. I have a cousin who lives in Singapore who works full time, so we are still associated.

But the firm is run by professional managers who know what they are doing. When it was [managed by] members of the family, it was [becoming] more and more complicated generation after generation—there were more and more people in the family not bearing the name. It would have been impossible to choose reasonable members to run the firm the way that we can [with] our fantastic professionals.

A lot of the members of the family live outside Cognac and they would only be interested by the money, and in the generation of my grandfather, he had enough strength to tell everybody else to shut up and that he was the boss. The next generation could have been my father, but he was a nuclear scientist; and it could have been his brother, but he was dead; or his cousins—they were good at their job—but we could see that there was no future because of the fact that a company like Hennessy requires enormous investments for aging cognac.

For that, you need banks and if you borrow too much money, then the bank will own you which is not what you want. We were not solid enough to go on our own to the stock exchange with some fresh money, so we married with Moët & Chandon—that was in 1971—and then we carried on and carried on.

We were doing extremely well, still as a family-run firm, but then in the late Eighties, Moët Hennessy married with Louis Vuitton and created LVMH, and then it became more and more obvious that the family members who were there were too old to carry on and were going to retire and they would be replaced by professional managers.

The other cognac firms, some of them are still owned by families, but they are very, very small. So it makes a big difference to be run and managed by professional managers who are from outside the region but who know how to market and sell. That’s probably what saved cognac because you have to remember that we represent 1-2% of the world's spirits market. We are very small and we have to be terribly professional to tell people, listen, we exist and we are the best.

It's not a kingdom anymore, not that the kings were always bad. It just would not have been very easy, plus if it had still been a family-owned company, it would be very difficult to run a family and a company at the same time. There’s a lot of politics which is a waste of time.

I remember that some of my uncles and aunts were a little bit sad when they couldn't call their brothers and say, oh, I saw this advertising, it's ridiculous and all of that it. I saw that happening when I was a kid in my grandfather's dining room on a Sunday. His sisters were there talking about advertising, which they knew nothing about.

It was ridiculous when on top of running a firm—which is a tough job—you have to suffer the fact that your sister wants new advertising, or your brother wants his son, who is an imbecile, to run the firm [chuckles].

See also: Why is shochu suddenly everywhere?

On cognac and Chinese cuisine

It happens that Chinese food and Hennessy marry very well, in terms of the alcohol content and the nature of the alcohol, which is completely natural. There’s the fact that even if you drink a little bit too much, you are not sick the next day—not that I encourage you to drink too much, but we had a tasting yesterday with the X.O, the Paradis and the Richard Hennessy, and the three of them were amazing.

If you have strong, peppery food, maybe the X.O resists it very well. If you have some food with less pepper and maybe more sweetness, then the Paradis is amazing. And then if you feel very rich and you have a very refined dessert, then the Richard Hennessy. So we have the variety.

The Chinese like to come to us; we entertain a lot of Chinese. In Cognac there’s a few firms that are owned by Chinese people, but also you see Chinese in a little town of 20,000 people where you have Chinese diners and all of that.

On the pandemic and its effects on cognac

During pandemic we had I think the best year ever in 2021. But the pandemic also created big problems: it's not really about the cognac, it's about delivery. For example, in the US you couldn't find enough dock workers or truck drivers to actually collect your cognac from the boat and deliver it to your distributor. In Cognac, we had problems with bottles because the glass factories were half-closed and then the everything reopened at the same time.

We had problems with machines because, you know, they are using chips which are made in [China], which was sort of closed. All of that made life complicated but it's nothing to do with the cognac itself. Last year sales came back to a normal level—after an enormous and incredible 2021, 2022 was a more reasonable year.

We were lucky because our machinery is not as complicated as car-building or whatever. We still have a lot of human brains used to make the blend, and that wasn't damaged.

On future challenges

My daughter is the boss [of our vineyard now]; she runs it because it's time for me to pass [the business] onto the next generation because it's very important. There's a lot of evolution in the way we tend vineyards in the Cognac region. We have to be closer and closer to nature: to plant trees, plant hedges, use a minimum of weed killer.

The whole thing is changing and it's very good that my daughter is diving into the new fashion because I could carry on and I would adapt but there's a time for the future. Still, I like to go and have a look and give my recommendations, but more and more it will be my daughter and I will just have to obey.

We’ve gone through quite a bit. We had diseases in the vineyard, we had Germans in the vineyard during World War Two. I think what could be a problem is the lack of workers. I have great people working for me, but I know that it can be difficult to recruit; kids don't really want to be farm workers and it's a pity because it's a great job but it has a very poor tradition of being underpaid and treated like dirt and all of that. Proper companies pay good money because we need these guys and girls because they are the production.

If my vineyard is badly pruned, I won't have a good harvest. If my wine is badly made because the guy doesn’t give a damn, then I won't be able to make a good cognac. And if my distillers are not serious, I will make a bad spirit and Hennessy won't buy it from me. We rely on very few people so they have to be trustworthy. My guys are going to do things, but I'm not there to watch it. I don't even know what they are doing. I just trust them, so they are very important people.

That mentality hasn't reached the workers yet—they don't realise how important they are, and it's very sad because they are very important.

In case you missed it: Spirits of the land: A guide to lesser-known Asian alcohol

On the current state of France

I was very surprised to hear when people told me that they had set the LVMH office on fire! That’s not true—they were there for 10 minutes. They had these red flares which really make a lot of red smoke and all of that, but they didn't set anything on fire.

I read in the press that they were kept by the discipline of some union leaders who knew that [CEO of LVMH] Bernard Arnault does a lot for young workers for creating new jobs, for opening new firms in France, and that it would be a very, very bad example to actually annoy a guy like Bernard simply because his name means “I'm rich”.

He is successful, good for him, but he does a lot more than many so-called ministers or MPs or whatever in France who are always on the news and who are absolutely useless. LVMH is rich but it's very important to know how much it does for the public, for the young who don’t really go to school and suddenly want to work. They train a lot of kids for jobs which are indispensable for the making of shoes, of fashion. You don't have proper schools for that, or a school will ask you for some diploma which you don't have.

He takes apprentices and trains them and gives them a job. 30,000 of them. So, I think it's important—not that I'm a big fan—but I admire him for that. He sponsors a fantastic museum, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, where they have extraordinary, interesting exhibitions. You pay to get in but you pay nothing compared to the cost of the whole thing. Okay, he's making money but he helps a lot, too.

On the best way to enjoy cognac

I don't drink on my own, sorry! I drink cognac with people, I drink mostly in the sitting room after lunch or dinner, or I drink it as a cocktail. What I make myself is basic, but I like it with ale and ice and lemon and it's very simple, but a proper cocktail made by a proper bartender is always a surprise.

You just tell him, I want a cocktail based on Hennessy—and it has to have Hennessy. That’s the problem [laughs].

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