The Cognac essence called Louis XIII is one of the world’s greatest luxuries, a superb spirit that’s elusive, expensive, and impossible to replicate. And few outsiders ever get to enter the inner sanctum of Rémy Martin, where Louis XIII is born.

Comparison to a monastery is apt; there is an element of mysticism in the process, and an air of the sacred around the result. I’d tasted Louis XIII before in a public relations setting, but the occasion was designed for clinical analysis rather than appreciation. So when Private Clubs offered to send me to France for an intensive Louis XIII experience hosted by Rémy Martin, I jumped at the chance.

Louis XIII takes several generations to be fully realized, in a hands-on process of aging, selecting, and blending that is more like nurturing than manufacturing. There are traces, or even dollops, of more than 1,000 Cognacs in the blend, some of them aged for 100 years, all from the Grande Champagne district in the viticultural heart of the Cognac region. Louis XIII is composed of blends within blends within blends, each made up of individually aged Cognacs chosen for their stellar character and sensual affinity with the grand design. Some of the cellar workers who carefully tend the liquid gold in the Louis XIII barrel room are working with blends that were begun by their grandfathers. How perfectly reasonable, then, that it’s presented in a Baccarat crystal decanter priced at $1,500.

Appropriately, Rémy Martin welcomed me to Paris with a dinner at the Baccarat Crystal Museum. Housed in a grand old mansion with red carpets on its sweeping limestone stairways, the Baccarat showcase is room after room of glittering fantasies framed by the decor of ultra-hip designer Phillipe Starck, showcasing one-of-a-kind objets d’art such as sculptures and chandeliers, along with jewelry, decanters, and wineglasses designed and fashioned from crystal by Baccarat artisans. Its exquisite little restaurant, The Cristal Room, is one of the most exclusive dining venues in the city that invented exclusive dining venues.

In that magical setting, beneath an ornate chandelier of black crystal (who knew there was such a thing?), I heard the story of the Rémy Martin family and Louis XIII. It turns out there really was a Rémy Martin, born in Cognac in 1695. He founded his namesake firm in 1724. The firm grew and prospered for 150 years before Rémy’s great-grandson, Paul-Emile Rémy Martin, created the luxury blend called Louis XIII in 1874.

Paul-Emile may have had this tête-de-cuvee in mind 24 years earlier, when he purchased a 17th century military canteen found on a battlefield site near Jarnac, and registered reproduction rights. In 1936, the luxury crystal producer Baccarat was commissioned to reproduce the canteen as a leaded crystal carafe. This stunning object became the iconic container for Louis XIII Cognac.

A TOUR OF COGNAC
After dinner, with Cuban cigars, the Cognac flowed — Rémy Martin Extra, a blend of Cognacs that are "only" 20 to 50 years old, with a sweet richness that’s lovely with fine tobacco. But no Louis XIII. Le Rois would appear the following evening, in Cognac itself.

The next day, I boarded the TGV at Montparnasse for a smooth three-hour run southwest of Paris to Angoulême, and hence through the little town of Cognac to a delightful countryside inn. Logis du Fresne is a typical estate of the region, a centuries-old stone farmhouse surrounded by an even older wall, with a majestic ash tree dominating the courtyard. Proprietors Christophe and Tone Butler have turned it into a simple, comfortable inn.

A morning helicopter tour of the Cognac region offered two revelations: just how close to the sea it is, and the way its low, undulating ridges allow the marine climate to interact with the highly reflective, white Jurassic chalk soil to produce pure, minerally wines that lack the ripe fruit character of table wines but are ideal for distillation.

The medium of transformation from wine to spirit is a wonderful anachronism. The alambic pot still was invented by medieval Arabs for distilling herbal medicines, but attained an arguably more noble use in Europe. It’s a beautiful contraption, with its dull sheen of hammered copper, and the graceful lines of its bulbous vessel and swan’s neck tubing. French sculptors have gnashed their teeth over it for centuries, not only because a great artistic concept is taken, but also because it belongs to a merely functional object — an appliance, you might say, which just happens to be the apotheosis of industrial design.

All winter long, in barns all over the Cognac region, thousands of pot stills gently distill the delicate wines from vineyards in the Charentes river valley into transparent spirits that ever so subtly convey the exquisite savor of maritime climate and limestone soil. The spirits are re-distilled, and the heart of the heart of the second distillation is trickled into oak barrels, where it will mellow for years, gradually taking on an amber hue that deepens with age. After the third year, these spirits will officially be deemed Cognac — by law, at least, although not by connoisseurs.

Slowly, the spirits transpire alcohol and water through the oaken staves (the lost portion is known as the "angels’ share"), concentrating their essences into amazing aromas of fruits, nuts, pastries, flowers, and spices. After five years in the barrel, they are deliciously complex. By 30 years, they become ethereal. Fifty-year-old Cognacs develop an astonishing depth of layered sensations as evocative as music. Somewhere around 60 or 70 years, the evolution begins to slow, as the underpinnings of alcohol and acidity reach the limit of endurance. After a century in the barrel, which by this time is beginning to be a little ethereal itself, the interaction of elements no longer promotes change, and the essence is transferred to glass demi-johns where their exalted state can be preserved indefinitely.

Great Cognacs are made by blending aged spirits so that each contributes its distinctive character to the greater good. The greatest Cognacs are works of art, the rarest of the rare, exquisite blends of aged Cognacs, each one exquisite in its own right.

TASTE TEST
Back on the ground, it was a short drive from the airstrip to the outskirts of Segonzac in the Grande Champagne district to visit one of the artisan vignerons who grow grapes and distill brandy for Rémy Martin. The harvest was in full swing. Michel Forgeron was out among the vines, so the winemaker — Madame Forgeron, in fact — took me through the winery. We tasted from a tank of just-fermented Ugni Blanc — a delicate wine with bracing acidity and a clean earthy savor — then she led me up and down ladders and along catwalks through the old family winery to a place where barrels and huge wooden blending vats held Cognacs produced by her family, from their own grapes, for generations. "Rémy Martin buys some of our very best lots, but we keep some for ourselves, too," she explained, gently easing a wooden plug from a barrel. "This one is just for our family." Dark amber from its years in wood (it was a blend of 1965 and ’67), the spirit was wonderfully mellow, with the clarity of complex aromas and flavors that signals Grande Champagne.

The evening’s festivities were at Maison Francis, the old family residence and chais in Cognac. They began with champagne in Paul-Emile’s private cellar. Framed by ornate iron stairs and catwalks designed by a protégé of Gustave Eiffel, the space evokes the Belle Epoque, a golden time when futuristic visions echoed mythological mysteries. That spirit was captured by Paul-Emile in his choice of the classical Centaur, Chiron, as the Rémy Martin logo: the son of Chronos, god of Time (an essential ingredient of Cognac), part man, part horse, eternally casting his spear into the future.

During an oddly whimsical dinner (foie gras popsicles, anyone?), we talked about the elusive Louis XIII (1601-43), the third monarch in the illustrious House of Bourbon (a name that must vex the Rémy Martin marketing people). Although his personal achievements, if any, were eclipsed by those of his adviser, Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII is generally remembered benevolently by the French, when they remember him at all. Richelieu, of course, changed the course of European history when he foiled the land-greedy Hapsburgs of Austria. But the King was simply an affable aristocrat and keen sportsman who was no more decadent than other monarchs of the time, who lived entirely within his cosmopolitan sphere and neither helped nor hindered the common man.

Finally, it was time for the common man to taste Louis XIII de Rémy Martin in the tiny cellar where it’s born. With the cold Atlantic rain pouring down outside, we took a candlelight walk through the barrel cellars, redolent with the heady scent of the "angels’ share," until we were standing in a treasure house of rare old Cognac. There, in a flickering glow, the plug was eased from a barrel and a taste of precious elixir was carefully drawn. An expectant hush filled the cellar, as if generations of workers were gathered in the shadows.

To bring a glass of Louis XIII to your nose is to dream — an instantaneous, intensely personal dream triggered by the senses on a deeply subconscious level. This remarkable phenomenon, a cavalcade of snapshot impressions evoking all of life’s pleasures, can be stimulated by many kinds of aromas (I regularly experience it walking past the markets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, for example), but is especially potent in fine wines and spirits. Cognac can be uncommonly powerful, and I’ve never felt anything like the kaleidoscopic rush of sensations unleashed by the vapors of Louis XIII. Cellarmaster Pierrette Trichet confided that the aftertaste lasts an hour or more. I don’t doubt her, although I personally didn’t have the patience to wait that long for another sip.

Rod Smith, wine columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a recipient of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for magazine writing about spirits, wine, and beer.