With multi-platinum fans and skyrocketing sales, Rémy Martin is, in many circles, synonymous with luxury. The 1724 company set the standard for VSOP Cognacs worldwide, and has seen its fair share of 20th-century corporatization. It has a curious connection to college basketball, too, and a far-reaching family tree.
Want to learn more? Here are nine things you should know about Rémy Martin.
Wine is the word.
Rémy Martin prides itself on being the only Cognac house founded by a winemaker. In 1724, a 29-year-old winemaker named (you guessed it) Rémy Martin created an eponymous Cognac trading house. In the 20th century, the company debuted the Cognac region’s first wine cooperative, the Alliance Fine Champagne. According to company literature, the cooperative now has 900 Grande and Petite Champagne growers providing the house with eau-de-vie.
Speaking of innovation, Rémy Martin loves being first.
In 1927, then-cellarmaster Andre Renaud created the world’s first VSOP Fine Champagne. Eleven years later, it was deemed an Appellation d’Origine Controlée under French law. Today, Rémy Martin VSOP Cognac is made with a blend of carefully sourced eaux-de-vie — four times as many as its competitors, according to the company — and aged nearly four times longer than legally required.
It has a lot in common with college basketball. No, really.
Rémy Martin is a 1724 French firm producing world-famous Cognac. Remy Martin (no accent) is a point guard for the Arizona State Sun Devils. During his 2017-2018 freshman season, Martin (the student athlete) told his college newspaper he hopes to be a role model for the Filipino diaspora. “All I want to do is help the culture, let people know there are Filipino basketball players that can play at this level and potentially do more,” Martin said.
There are two family trees in the company’s origin story.
For three centuries, two clans have been intimately engaged in running the company. There is the Rémy Martin family, all of whom descended from the founder, and those connected to la famille Heriard Dubreuil. They are related to Andre Heriard Dubreuil, the son-in-law of Andre Renaud, who became a partner in E. Rémy Martin & Co. circa 1910, and later the company’s cellarmaster. Andre Heriard Dubreuil became president of the company in 1965. In 1990, his daughter, Dominique Heriard Dubreuil, succeeded him as president.
Another French family got in the mix in the ’90s.
In 1849, two brothers, Edouard-Jean and Adolphe Cointreau, ditched their confectionary business and became liqueur distillers. Their orange-scented success is the stuff of legends. In 1990, the Cointreau family’s holding company, Cointreau & Cie SA, merged with E. Rémy Martin & Cie SA, the holding company owned by Herard Dubreuil. This merger begat the Rémy Cointreau Group.
We’re not in Cognac, France any more.
The Rémy Cointreau Group’s current portfolio includes Rémy Martin, Louis XIII de Rémy Martin, an 1874 Cognac Grande Champagne, and Cointreau, of course, as well as Bruichladdich Scotch, Mount Gay Rum, Botanist Gin, an American single-malt whiskey distiller called Westland, the Greek spirit Metaxa, and several other liqueurs.
You can invest in Rémy Martin on a sliding scale.
The collection of Cognacs under the Rémy Martin label includes VSOP, a blend of eaux-de-vie that retails for $58; the 1738 Accord Royal, created to commemorate an official nod given to the house by Louis XV ($77); XO, a blend of some 400 eaux-de-vie ($180); and the Carte Blanche a Baptiste Loiseau, a rather grandly named Cognac that contains a blend of eaux-de-vie from a single vat at the discretion of cellarmaster Baptiste Loiseau. The latter run from $301 to $649. The company also produces eaux-de-vie and what it calls Duty-Free Cognacs, called Cellar no. 16 and Cellar No. 28.
Rémy Martin is big and getting bigger.
Sales of Rémy Martin were up 13.2 percent in 2017, making it the third-best-selling Cognac in the world. (According to The Spirits Business, the Nos. 1 and 2 top-selling Cognacs are Hennessy and Martell, respectively.) Rémy Martin’s growth was part of a category-wide upswing. There were 86.2 million bottles of Cognac shipped to the U.S., its largest export market, in 2017, and global exports of Cognac hit an all-time high in both value and volume.
Fetty Wap is a superfan.
How much does rapper Fetty Wap love Rémy Martin 1738 Accord Royal Cognac? Let the good people of SplinterNews count the ways. The music site catalogued 51 mentions of 1738 on his 2015 eponymous debut album. Fetty Wap also reportedly calls his friend group the Remy Boyz or Remy Boyz 1738, too (he apparently mentions them some 35 times on the record). At the time of this writing, his Twitter account, FettyWap1738, has 763,000 followers.