CaddellWilliams Brochure

The finest spirit in the world came from a small distillery in Mendocino County, California

Hubert Germain-Robin

Best on the planet
SPIRIT & COCKTAIL MAGAZINE

The greatest in the world
ROB NALLEY/DEPARTURES MAGAZINE

Best liquor
ROBB REPORT

The Germain-Robin distillery in 1982

Die Besten der Welt
VINOVERUM/SWITZERLAND

Equal to the very best
NEW YORK TIMES

One of the world’s top ten distillers
DELTA SKY MAGAZINE

Some of the world’s finest
ANTHONY DIAS BLUE/BON APPETIT

The best made
WINE NEWS

Unmatched quality
CONNOISEURS GUIDE

Some of the world’s best
MATT KRAMER/FAST COMPANY

No cognac is as good as Germain-Robin
DAN BERGER/LA TIMES

The best in the world
DALLAS MORNING NEWS

What was special about Germain-Robin

Germain-Robin Still

PREMIUM GRAPES: Germain-Robin was the first to use great wine for distillation. We distilled exclusively 100% premium wine varietals: pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, semillon. All European distillers use grapes that make mediocre wine: that’s why they began to distill them in the first place. This is why we’ve received all the “best in the world” reviews: our brandies come from the best distilling material ever used. Some of our pinot noir brandies cost us $10,000/barrel for the grapes. The resulting quality is almost unbelievable: profound richness of flavor, perfect smoothness, and unmatched complexity.

DISTILLATION METHODS: The finest methods ever devised. We distilled with the hand methods used to distill cognac in the 19th-century, using an antique still taken from an abandoned distillery in Cognac. We aged in air-dried Limousin oak. We blended very slowly, over many years. We adjusted to bottling proof with rainwater.

What made Germain-Robin famous:

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SELECT BARREL XO (no longer available from us). Astonishing quality. Ten barrels/year of the brandy that gained us most of the reviews on the first page. Based 80% on brandies from pinot noir. complex, elegant, very smooth. “Hubert Germain-Robin is making far better brandy than he or his ancestors ever did in France. The depth and richness of the XO are extraordinary” – FRANK PRIAL, NEW YORK TIMES

ANNO DOMINI. Exquisite product, released in 2000 and rated absolutely the best spirit you can buy in the whole wide world by ROBB REPORT MAGAZINE’s “Best of the Best” experts. Blew away Remy Martin’s Louis XIII. In it was our finest aged pinot noir, an astonishing mix of brilliance and softness, with a very special creamy sherry note from a palomino component. Annual series: 300 bottles. “Superior to Hennessy Paradis and equal to the best very old single-vintage, small producer cognacs” – R W APPLE, NEW YORK TIMES

We still have some of out best:

In 2013, I asked Joe Corley to start assembling what we called SMALL BLENDS, to take advantge of the incredible richness of our cellar, rich not only in aged brandies, but also in the unmatched range of flavor due to our ongoing use of premium varietal grapes, brandies from French colombard, pinot moir, sauvignon blanc, semillion, viognier, and some 7 others, whose characteristics as brandies are as richly varied as they are as wine, but deeper and more pure. I asked Corley simply to blend the best brandies he could, focusing on brandies that had aged for more than 15 years. Corley assembled 3 SMALL BLENDS. BLEND NO.1 sold out quickly, but what remained of NOS. 2 & 3 were sold back to us by Gallo when they purchased the brand in 2019. They are among the finest brandies ever released; were they cognacs, they would be priced far higher.

SMALL BLEND NO. 3. 1996 Roederer Pinot Noir, 1985 Gamay, two 1997 Colombards, and a 1996 blend of brandies from aromatic grapes: Muscat, Riesling, & Viognier. Extraordinary richness, balance, and complexity. 44% abv. $285.

SMALL BLEND NO. 2. A personal favorite: 1984 Gamay, rich 1989 old-vine Colombard, and an elegant 1994 Pinot Noir from Napa’s Clos du Val. Truly great brandy: buy this. 44.5% abv. $285.

OLD HAVANA MENS’S JOURNAL called this “one of the world’s great brandies”. We made fewer than 200 cases/year. The blend originated during the 1990s cigar craze, but don’t be fooled: it surpasses XO quality, with a rich, beautiful, and distinctively Californian fruitiness. Armagnac devotees appreciate its full-bodied depth. Cigar lovers: makes the best Cuban taste even better. 40% abv. $120.

ANSLEY’S ALAMBIC BRANDY – Release No. 1: A 2013 blend of three brandies distilled from Roederer Estate pinot noir in 2002, 2003, and 2004, then aged an additional 10 years. 311 bottles straight from the cask, unfiltered. Rich, subtle, wonderful fruit, great length. Truly fabulous: a cognac of this quality would sell for at least $1500. Limit 1 bottle per customer. A bargain. 44% ABV $240.00

n 2013, Joe Corley also bottled three very old single-barrel brandies, at barrel proof. Aged brandies have a deep intensity because, as they age, they evaporate alcohol but the flavor, the original esters, stay behind. becaoming increasingly concentrated and, through aging, deeper in flavor. We released three of them, one is sold out but we have a few bottles left of the other two. No cognac can match the deep varietal fruitiness.

BARREL 351: A single barrel of 1987 Pinot Noir from the Welch vineyards in Potter Valley. Bottled at 26 years, it has great concentration of flavor, the angel’s share leaving 44.9% from the original 71%. Our most noble brandy. 30 bottles remain. Limit 1 bottle per customer. 44.9% ABV $600.00

BARREL V154: If I had to choose a bottle from everything we ever made, it would be this one, a single barrel of 1985 old-vine Chenin Blanc from the Wegner vineyard. Bottled at 28 years, it has aged absolutely perfectly: deep Chenin fruit, huge concentration of flavor. The aromatics are wonderfully intense. A cognac wholesaler tasted it and said: “if this were Hennessy, it would be $5000”. We have 12 bottles. Limit 1 bottle per customer. 44.9% ABV $600.00

In 1990, when my son Augustín was born, Hubert followed a hallowed Cognac custom by putting some of our finest recent pinot noir brandies (Potter Valley, northernmost grapes in California = great definition of flavor) in a small Limousin oak cask. Bottled when Augustín reached 22, it is sublime. 42.7% ABV $700.00

AUGUSTÍN’S BLEND: Pinot Noirs from 1988 and 1989, with a touch of Colombard, aged for 22 years in a 50-liter cask. Colombard fruit, way deeper now, and beautifully long Pinot refinement. Limit 1 bottle per customer. 42.7% ABV $700.00

For the handful of remaining bottles of our 30-year-old release and of Cask 17.2: visit https://caddellwilliams.com/brands/old-rare/

How two men out in the middle of Mendocino nowhere created the finest product that ever passed through a still

In the summer of 1981, I stopped along Highway 101 north of San Francisco to pick up a pair of vacationing hitch-hikers. The man came from a family that had produced cognac since 1782. The firm had recently been taken over by giant Martell. Hubert Germain-Robin told me a sad tale: ancient hand-methods of distillation were disappearing as the huge firms that dominate production applied “improved” high-volume production methods to an ancient industry. Hubert yearned to find a way to use what he had learned growing up, secrets of distillation handed from master to apprentice for centuries.

The next summer, Hubert found an antique still in an abandoned cognac distillery, had it refitted, and shipped it to my Mendocino County ranch, in the northern part of California’s fabled wine country. We built a modest redwood shed, and in it we made an historic discovery. We decided to experiment with premium wines, instead of the thin acidic wines – not fit for the table – that are used to make Cognac. The very first time that brandy distilled from pinot noir flowed from the still, Hubert put his nose in the sampling glass, took a long sniff, turned to me, and said, “this is the finest I have ever seen”.

Joes Corley, former distiller and cellarmaster at Germain-Robin, was getting ready to bottle the whiskey

Hubert and Joe Corley, the man Hubert trained for 7 years to replace him (2006), used hand methods to distill these higher-quality, more flavorful wines. They distilled brandies which are richly flavored yet remained delicate and subtle. The flavors are authentic because they come from the original grapes, without needing the oaki flavoring, sugar, and caramel that European producers add to make up for their harsher and more neutral grapes. Germain-Robin brandies are very pure, without any alcoholic roughness. People often tell us that they never enjoyed brandy/cognac/armagnac before they tried GERMAIN-ROBIN, a tribute to the purity, delicacy, and outstanding flavor of which we are so proud.

“From time out of mind, brandy and cognac have been distilled with less-than-remarkable grapes, both in Cognac and abroad. Anyone can distill grapes. No one ever thought to do what Ansley and Hubert do. Never before has anyone spent $1,700 per ton on grapes for brandy. When the very first brandy ran out of the small, antique still that Hubert had brought over from France, he told Ansley that it was of a quality like no other spirit he had experienced. And I know that as Hubert is the spirit, and Ansley is the messenger, no one will ever be able to do it as they do. I thank them, as you will, for the moments that live in every one of their extraordinary bottles… one of the world’s most impressive spirits in any category.”

RIANNON WALSH – TYCOON MAGAZINE