From the Ariège to New York, and back to Eauze.

Domaine Tariquet — also written Domaine du Tariquet, and Château du Tariquet in some guides — is a wine and Armagnac estate at Eauze, in the Gers, the town the company calls the capital of Bas-Armagnac. The company says the property dates back to the 17th century, belonged to the Montesquiou family, an old Gascon noble house, and that the first known written mention of its Armagnac production dates from 1683.

The family story begins in the Pyrenees. The company says Pierre Artaud, from the village of Ercé in the Ariège, sailed for the Americas in the 1880s and made his living as a bear trainer, touring a show to growing audiences. Le Figaro Vin, telling the same story in January 2022, describes him as a travelling showman who set off for New York with two bears. In 1912, the company says, Pierre and his son Jean-Pierre, then a bartender in New York, pooled their savings to buy Tariquet, with about seven hectares of vines; Le Figaro Vin adds that phylloxera had left the estate in poor condition. Jean-Pierre was wounded in the First World War, went back to the United States for a few years and settled at the estate for good in 1922, both sources say.

The Grassa name arrived by marriage. The company says Jean-Pierre’s daughter Hélène Artaud married Pierre Grassa, the son of a neighbouring farmer whose family had come from Spain to work on the Somport tunnel, in 1946. The couple revived the estate’s Armagnac while keeping up mixed farming, and, the company and Le Figaro Vin both say, bought the first modern tractor in the region with help from the Marshall Plan. The company says the estate had 10 hectares of vines in 1946 and 50 by 1972.

Armagnac in bottles, then a white wine for Gascony.

The next generation changed what Tariquet made. French Wikipedia, citing a Wine Society review of 2011–2012, says Yves Grassa and his sister Maïté took over from Hélène and Pierre in 1972. The company says that until then its Armagnac had been sold only in barrels to merchants, and that bottling at the estate began in 1972, with Yves in charge of production and Maïté driving across France to sell the bottles to wine shops and restaurants.

The turn to wine came a decade later. Le Figaro Vin reported in 2022 that the family’s table wines were first made in 1982 by Yves and Maïté, at a time when growers in Bas-Armagnac were looking to diversify, and quoted Rémy Grassa recalling that his father decided at once to produce 20,000 bottles of Ugni blanc under the Côtes de Gascogne name. French Wikipedia, citing a 2012 report by the Swiss broadcaster RTS, says Yves took up wine on the advice of the oenologist Denis Dubourdieu. The result was Classic, a dry white made from Ugni blanc, the grape grown on the estate for its Armagnac; the company calls it its historic wine and says its first bottling was the 1982 vintage. Its blend has since added Colombard, Gros Manseng and Sauvignon.

Other wines followed. The company credits Yves with championing the local Gros Manseng and Petit Manseng grapes in Gascony and with bringing in Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Chenin, and dates Premières Grives, a slightly sweet Gros Manseng white, to the early 1990s. It says the vineyard grew from about 100 hectares in the early 1980s to about 400 by the mid-1990s. The white wines carry the Côtes de Gascogne IGP, and the guide Gault&Millau calls the estate a “locomotive” of the Côtes de Gascogne, with Classic as its emblematic white.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all cognac and Armagnac names: Pierre Ferrand, Frapin, Darroze, Château de Laubade, Larressingle, Janneau and Tariquet. Cognac and Armagnac houses in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family estates that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A cognac or Armagnac brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its brandy is actually distilled, aged and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its brandy is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Five generations, one family estate.

A fifth generation now runs the estate. The company says Yves’s sons, Armin and Rémy Grassa, studied viticulture and oenology in France and abroad before joining the business and were given the reins in 2005; Le Figaro Vin quoted Rémy in 2022 recalling that their father announced on the eve of that year’s harvest that he was stepping back, because young trees do not grow in the shade of old oaks. The company says the estate had 750 hectares of vines when the brothers took over and cultivates more than 1,125 today. Le Figaro Vin gave the same 1,125 hectares in production in 2022, with about nine million bottles a year and no grapes bought in, and reported that the family had set itself a ceiling of 1,300 hectares; Gault&Millau’s guide gives a figure of close to 900 hectares.

Ownership has stayed in the family. The company describes the Grassas as “proudly independent wine growers,” says all of its wines and Armagnacs come only from the family’s own vineyards, and says everything from planting to bottling is done by its own teams; Gault&Millau describes the business as still independent and family-run. Le Figaro Vin reported in 2022 that about 40 per cent of production was exported, naming Scandinavia, Canada and the United States, and that the brothers’ Imprévu, a white blend of Ugni blanc and Riesling, is a nod to their mother, who came from Berlin in the 1970s.

Armagnac remains part of the estate. Rémy Grassa told Le Figaro Vin that about 100 hectares are devoted to it and that the family keeps around 5,000 casks in six stores. The company sells its Bas-Armagnacs in a range of carafes — among them VSOP Classic, Cabossée VSOP and Baroque Hors d’Âge, the last in a wooden box it says is made by a local craftsman from Landes pine — and a Pure Folle Blanche line from the Folle Blanche grape, which it says the family reintroduced in the 1980s, including a clear Blanche Armagnac. It also lists a Bas-Armagnac called Montreur d’Ours, French for “bear trainer,” made from Plant de Graisse, an old grape it says the estate’s team has brought back.

For a design guide, Tariquet shows how one family name can carry a 17th-century Armagnac estate and a modern Gascon white wine at once, with a founder’s story that the company still tells on its own pages. Compare Château de Laubade, another Armagnac house in this series, and Château de Beaucastel, the Perrin family’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape estate. For this guide we use Armagnac amber, cellar brown and vine green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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