Cognac Hardy

British-born wine and spirits dealer Anthony Hardy moved to the Charente in the mid-1800s to oversee his brokerage investments between Great Britain and France. The die was cast; Anthony fell in love with the region, marrying locally and eventually changing his name to Antoine. Antoine purchased vineyards in 1863 and set up his own distillery, choosing a cockerel, or young rooster, as the house symbol.

In the following decades, Maison Hardy flourished, winning prestige with its Fine Cognac Contrôlée at the Amsterdam exhibition in 1869, and despite curtailed trade with Great Britain, the devastation of phylloxera, and the untimely death of Antoine’s son, Valère, before Word War I, Hardy persevered by selling old stocks and continuing its outreach to new markets eager for fine brandy. By 1957, when the family formalized a limited company, with Jacques Hardy as the managing director, Hardy Cognac was available in Eastern Europe (where Antoine had solidified the house’s reputation in Russia), North and South America, Asia, and Africa.

Today, Maison Hardy is helmed by fifth-generation family member Bénédicte Hardy, who continues to be a global ambassador for her family’s love of Charente and the Cognacs it produces. Maison Hardy works closely with farmers from multiple crus to produce eaux-de-vie that contribute to Hardy’s sizable painter’s palette of stocks, which are aged beyond minimum category requirements then blended by Hardy’s maître de chai in their facilities along the Charente River to create rich, accessible Cognacs. The Hardy Tradition range features classic Cognac marques, blended to best express the Maison Hardy style and priced for both sipping and mixing. Hardy’s prestige collection continues the house’s long legacy of pairing rare, decades-old Cognacs (many set aside by Bénédicte’s grandfather, Armand, prior to Germany’s occupation of the region in 1940) with bottles crafted by France’s most prestigious crystal makers, epitomizing luxury as only Cognac can.