What do Hors d'Age and XXO mean on a bottle?

XXO stands for Extra Extra Old and requires that the youngest eau-de-vie in the bottle has matured for at least fourteen years.

The French arrêté of 8 November 2018 added the designations XXO and Extra Extra Old to the cahier des charges of the Cognac designation of origin. The same text states that anyone using the designation must report this on the accompanying documents and must be able to substantiate it in their records to the Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac.

Hors d’Age falls, for cognac, under the same age class as XO and therefore requires at least ten years of maturation of the youngest eau-de-vie.

For armagnac the lower limit is also ten years. The Bureau National Interprofessionnel de l’Armagnac adds that armagnacs under this heading are in practice often much older than the legal minimum, because houses use the name for their older blends. A number on the label is therefore not always stated.

The age of cognac runs from 1 April after the harvest; everything distilled before that is called compte 00.

After that date the batch moves on to compte 1, the next year to compte 2, and so on up to compte 10. The count is therefore not a calendar sum but an administrative system that customs has the Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac manage. All age statements on the label refer to those comptes.

With armagnac, Hors d’Age means the youngest eau-de-vie has spent at least ten years in wood, just like with cognac.

The difference lies in what stands beside it. For cognac the extra grade XXO has existed since 2018, from fourteen years; that mention belongs to the designation of origin Cognac. For armagnac, XO and Hors d’Age are the designations above VSOP, and the region also works a lot with vintages that carry a harvest year on the label.

Age statements such as XO, XXO and Hors d’Age always refer to the youngest eau-de-vie in the blend, not to the average.

A house that bottles an old melange may therefore only state the lower limit it can prove. If it puts a number on it, the entire melange must reach that number. Many houses therefore choose a letter designation. Feel free to ask in the shop what lies behind a designation; we look it up with the producer.