328-year-old cognac found by collector is confirmed as oldest in world
Written by Shresta Dutt on August 28, 2024
A 328-year-old cognac has been certified as the oldest in existence.
The bottle of 1696 Jules Robin Cognac belongs to Dutch collector Lars Janssen, who recently discovered it among his vast reserve of rare cognacs.
It is 24 years older than the previous known oldest cognac, a bottle of 1720 Caves Du Restaurant owned by Vietnamese collector Nguyen Dinh Tuan Viet.
This record is based upon the date on which the cognac was distilled, not bottled.
Although the record-breaking cognac was distilled in 1696 – a time when King Louis XIV ruled over France and King William III sat on the English throne – it wasn’t bottled until around 200 years later, sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s by Jules Robin and Edmond Jaulin.
Their company, named after Robin, was founded in 1850, thus the “1696” imprinted on the bottle was not intended to represent their origination, it was to denote the cognac’s vintage year of production.
Upon his retirement from the company in the late 1890s, Jaulin was gifted the bottle by Robin as a token of appreciation.
