Cognac: Prestige Distilled - Luxury and the Making of Meaning

In Cognac: Prestige Distilled, Bill Johns investigates one of the most symbolically potent spirits in the world and reveals how its prestige is less about what's in the glass than how the glass performs. From the chalky soils of Grande Champagne to the ornate crystal decanters of Louis XIII, from colonial export routes to contemporary rituals in Lagos, Atlanta, and Shanghai, Johns maps how cognac became a liquid signifier-at once aristocratic and insurgent, anchored in French regulation yet radically reinterpreted across cultures.

This is not a connoisseur's guide, nor a collector's showcase. It is a cultural history of attention. Johns interrogates the aesthetics of the bottle, the erasure of the Ugni Blanc grape from public memory, and the semiotic labor performed by label, cork, and age statement. He tracks how cognac moved through imperial circuits and was later reimagined by postcolonial elites and Black artists as a tool of self-authorship. Along the way, he challenges the mythology of refinement to ask a deeper question: What do we make visible-and what do we silence-when we assign value?

Author of acclaimed works on bourbon, tequila, gin, vodka, soju, sake, mezcal, baijiu, schnaps, cachaça, ouzo, and absinthe, Johns brings his signature style-clear, steady, and structurally exacting-to the most curated of spirits. With the eye of a systems thinker and the restraint of a cultural historian, he shows how prestige is not born, but built.

For readers who care not just what a spirit tastes like, but what it means, Cognac: Prestige Distilled offers a lens as sharp as it is provocative. The bottle, Johns argues, is never just a vessel. It is an argument in glass.