From Mesopotamia to Armagnac

The alambic is inextricably linked  with eau-de-vie! Intimidating and impressive as it can be, this complex apparatus with its multitude of pipes and metallic vessels transforms wine into eau-de-vie.  This transformation process, known as distillation, is as sophisticated as it is ancient.  You have to travel far, both in time and space, to find its origins.

To discover the first traces of the alambic, we need to take a journey to Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) where two vessels dating from 3500 BC considered as primitive alambics were discovered.  They prove that the earliest beginnings of distillation go back to the fourth millennium BC and usher in a long history of improvement and innovation.

The first significant innovations occur quite soon and rapidly move down through Mesopotamia.  In fact, it was in Egypt that the first real distillation apparatuses saw the light of day before the Greeks perfected them at the beginning of the first millennium.  The word alambic comes from the Greek ‘ambix’ which meant both the vessel where the liquid is brought to boiling point and that where the alcohol was condensed, after passing through a tube linking the two vessels, before trickling out (distil comes from the word destillare which means to drip/trickle down).

After these adventures in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece, it was the Arabs who appropriated the alambic and gave it its final name ‘al-inbiq’, inspired by the Greek. Nevertheless, at that time, the alambic was limited to making essential oils for beauty products and perfumes.  It was only very gradually that distillation techniques were mastered and that a concentrated alcohol, this burning water, “wine that can be lit when in contact with a flame”: eau-de-vie, was eventually produced.

Moreover, in France, the first to develop an eau-de-vie made from wine were people from the Armagnac area who have been distilling wine from their exceptional terroir for more than 700 years.