You're all heart. Just 36° today, aircon on full blast, gonna be difficult to sleep though. Couple cognacs help...
Cognac's actually not that popular in France, most of it goes to export. (The French are big fans of Scotch and American whisky these days) Oh, there was record setting heat last year in Southern Italy too.
That's true, far more whisky. I think it was the English who developed a taste for brandy, way back when.
Yes, most of it was exported to England, and then America had a brief taste for cognac in the early 1900s before Prohibition, was commonly used in mixed drinks and was a big fad.
The story I heard - I don't know if it's true - was that the English owners of French vineyards decided it was cheaper to distill wine before shipping it to England, and were then going to add the water back in, until they found out that it was much better as it was.
That might be true. Cheap whisky from the UK is shipped to the States at 60% in massive vats and water added at the bottling plant. Another possibility is that, like port wine, brandy was popular because it survived the long, hot journey to India much better than wine did. Most of the world's port is still consumed by the English (around 70%) despite being made only in Portugal.
Port was always very popular in England, along with gin - known as 'mothers ruin' because it was cheap and working-class women used to get drunk on it. Boozy lot, the British. Btw, I think the name brandy comes from a Dutch expresssion meaning 'burnt wine'.
Did you have a point to make? "Talk about the polar vortex! A list of the coldest weather ever recorded in each state" https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...19-cold-weather-record-temperatures/38974589/
