“It’s a relief, the campaign went well,” says Éric Pinard, distiller based in Jarnac (Charente) and president of the Syndicate of Professional Boilers. In Charente and Charente-Maritime, the distillation campaign giving birth to cognac eaux-de-vie officially ended on March 31 on a positive note: none of the 2,900 stills listed had to suffer from real shortages of propane. or natural gas during the winter.
A mild winter
The energy crisis was on everyone’s mind last fall, after the harvest. The players in the Cognac vineyard, which usually consume 560 gigawatt hours (GWh) of gas per year, feared a disruption in supply and an explosion in prices. “We didn’t have a problem in the end. The winter was mild and the population consumed less,” says Éric Pinard in particular. The general concern, he continues, will have at least allowed “a good trial run, a blank shot”, specifies this Jarnacais: “The organization that we had imagined could be tested. We also had monthly meetings with representatives of the sector and the State to anticipate the most appropriate measures. »
Éric Pinard also notes a positive effect of this dreaded and ultimately avoided shortage: “This will enable us to accelerate our energy transition. We were sometimes hesitant to invest. We now know that it is necessary, both to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and for economic reasons. »
The satisfaction of Cognac professionals, who distilled at a frantic pace this winter, finally concerns the volumes produced. Nearly 1.05 million hectoliters of pure alcohol would thus have been obtained according to the first estimates of the BNIC quoted by the daily “Sud Ouest”, that is to say one of the two biggest campaigns of the last decade. “The eaux-de-vie are better than we initially imagined. This will allow us to build up stocks to anticipate future growth,” says Éric Pinard.