Spirits & Gastronomy

Time as an ingredient. Nine houses file here, from only two countries — France and the United Kingdom — and they hold the widest founding span in the register: 1724 to 2006, two hundred and eighty-two years. Rémy Martin, at 1724, is the oldest house in the whole book.

Nothing in this room can be accelerated. A champagne house that decides today to make a prestige cuvée finds out whether it worked in a decade; Dom Pérignon's P2 and P3 releases are that argument made into a product line, a house selling you the years it spent not selling you anything. Krug blends champagne the way a composer scores, and Clos du Mesnil is what happens when a single walled vineyard is treated as a cathedral. Veuve Clicquot's yellow label is proof that a colour can be a moat — a trademark laid down by Nicole Ponsardin two centuries before anybody used the word branding.

This register used to print a growth figure beside that last sentence. It came from a luxury table Brand Finance never issued for that year, and it is gone, with nothing in its place. The argument does not need it: a colour that has been defensible since 1772 does not require a ranking to be interesting.

Louis XIII is the other kind of patience — a decanter of eaux-de-vie aged up to a century, which means the cellar master who laid it down is rarely the one who signs it out. Limited100's Luxury Brand Index for 2025 Q4 put it twelfth of the hundred brands it ranks, inside the same table as Bugatti and Patek Philippe, which is a fair description of what a bottle at that price is competing with.

Hennessy is the cash register that funds the cathedral. Armand de Brignac, founded 2006, is the youngest thing in the room by more than a century and the clearest evidence that this category will accept a new house — as long as the new house is prepared to wait.