Jollité VSOP Armagnac

Chocolate notes as though a hershey is Melting in your MOUTH

Rating: 7/23 I remember hating this because it was horribly tannic with a big formaldehyde presence. It was truly a miserable experience. I'm honestly not sure why I'm giving it another shot. OK, so actually, I was so confused by the last bottle I tried that I decided to get another one to give this another chance. DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKE. This is some of the worst swill I have ever encountered and it's marked at $40. N: Fruits ranging from mild and floral to dark and rich with some woody spices. Dark cherry, orange peel, raisin, star anise, clove, ginger, cinnamon. Oh yeah, but there's also this big meaty sulfur hit and something metallic. I like how rich the fruits are, but the sulfur goes beyond funky and rancio, well into poor distillate territory. P: Wow, this is nothing like the palate I recall! There must be some serious batch variation/quality control issues going on here. Yeah, there are plenty of tannins and there's some formaldehyde, but there's also a ton of sulfur and rancio! I'm honestly not sure which version is worse. The fruits are rich with a sweet dark, dried quality. There are some nice woody spices in here, suggesting a decent degree of age in barrels of reasonable quality. It's rich enough that the 40% ABV isn't a problem and it doesn't taste like a bunch of sugar was just tossed in either. The metallic flavor gradually comes out though. That alcohol is there too. Drinking it actually starts to give me a headache (which is a quality that I recall from last time) and it burns my mouth more than I'd normally expect for 40% ABV. If it weren't for the high amount of sulfur and that metallic flavor, I could get past the other problems and enjoy this well enough I think. F: There's more metal and sulfur on the finish. The rich fruits and nice spices drop out considerably, but the floral elements stick around. This is definitely the worst part of this Armagnac. I can appreciate some rancio on this finish, but that just is not what this is. This isn't a funky complexity: it's a serious flaw. So I think there is some serious batch variation going on here because this is nothing like what I had before. It does continue the tradition of being something that one could fairly characterize as poison though. Unlike my last bottle, which was incredibly tannic, this one is somewhat smoother, but it's obvious that it is incredibly young. There is a miserable amount of sulfur here and a big metallic taste, along with a gross artificial caramel flavor. It's disgusting. In desperation, I tried throwing a bunch of wood chips in - not because I thought it would make this Armagnac good, but because I thought it might clear up some of the sulfur - and giving it a few days. While that never produces a good product since it eats away the complexity and adds a flat flavor in its place, it does make a dramatic improvement here and since there is a lot going on to begin with, the outcome actually moves mostly in the right direction. The wood chips did help to remove a fair amount of the sulfur and some of the metal, but there was still enough left that I couldn't figure out what to do with all of this Armagnac. I tried blending with it in extremely small quantities (<1%, to simulate an Armagnac finish) and it did work OK for that, but it wasn't great by any means. At ~$10, the wood chipped version of this might be worth trying a bottle of. This goes for multiple times that though and requires you to toast and mix in a few bucks of wood chips yourself just to get something approaching drinkable. I'm terms of VFM, there is no question that this is a hard pass. Excluding the possibility of simply "OK" bottles costing hundreds of dollars, I'm fairly confident that this is the worst value for money I have ever encountered. I guess that's an impressive achievement. In terms of overall quality, this is down dangerously close to Piper's Clan and Clan MacGregor. Just plain bad. So what rating to I give this? It's actually kind of tough. In the right circumstance, the sulfur and metallic flavors aren't as noticeable, which is a great boon for this brandy. In other circumstances though, they are completely oppressive. There's also the burn and the formalehyde flavor. At its worst, I can see this as a 4 or maybe (just maybe) even a 3. At its best, I could justify a 9 - or perhaps a 10 if I were feeling extra generous. I'd put this below Ainsley Brae Burgundy and above Piper's Clan (I have to fall back to my bottom shelf scotch for comparison since I don't have anything else close in flavor profile). That puts this more in the 4-7 range. I think that 5-7 is the most plausible range at this point. I'm going with a 6 because I think that this is a bit closer in quality to Ainsley Brae (8) than it is to Piper's Clan (3) or Glen Logie (4). This is pretty competitive with Grant's (7) (a sad statement), but isn't quite as good. Grant's is more of a high 7/low 8, so I can see this being a 7. Still, I think by this point my palate has adjusted to the sulphur a bit. So, it might really be a 6, but the richness is nice, especially when compared with the excessive alcohol that Grant's has. I'm going with a 7. If my placement of this midway between Glen Logie and Ainsley Brae despite claiming that it's closer in quality to the latter says anything, it's that I overrated Glen Logie previously because right now Glen Logie and Piper's Clan taste pretty tied. Looking back, I recall starting with this at a 3 on my old bottle and then sort of gaslighting myself into thinking it was a 13. I do think that the 3 was too harsh, but the 13 was also far too generous. My current 6 to 7 rating strikes a nice balance, increasing my confidence in it.

Nose - apple, cranberry, cherry, vanilla, yeasty breadiness, wisp of smoke, moderate ethanol burn. Taste - apple, vanilla cream, cherry, clove, allspice, caramel, moderate to high alcohol bite, finishing quick, young, and bright with fading caramel, sour fruit, and yeast flavors. There’s not much going on here. The flavors are nice, but muddled and not fully developed. The sour and bready notes don’t integrate well with the larger flavor profile. Overall, it drinks a bit too young for my liking. Many thanks to @ContemplativeFox for providing the sample.