A Huguenot family, a return to France and a town on the Charente.

The Delamain story, as the house tells it, begins in 1625, when Nicholas Delamain left his native Saintonge for London in the household of Henrietta Maria of France, the sister of Louis XIII, who was going to England to marry Charles I. The family stayed on the other side of the Channel for more than a century. English Wikipedia, citing two articles in Le Monde from 2017 and 2023, says James Delamain worked with his older brother Henry at the Delftware pottery in Dublin before turning to brandy.

The company says James began his return to France in 1751, working in the trade in cognac eaux-de-vie, and settled in Jarnac, on the banks of the Charente, in 1759. There he went into partnership with Jean-Isaac Ranson, whose export house traded in Charente brandy. English Wikipedia, citing Le Monde and the town of Jarnac’s own history page, dates the firm of Ranson & Delamain to 1763; the company describes the partnership as coming three years after James’s arrival. English Wikipedia says the firm was wound up in 1817.

The business that carries the name today dates from 1824. That year, English Wikipedia says, Henri Delamain, a descendant of James, and his cousin Paul Roullet founded Roullet et Delamain, which built up exports to England and northern Europe. The house now dates its founding to that year: its website carries the line “Crafting of curiosity since 1824,” and a press release issued by the Bollinger group in 2024 opens with “Fondée en 1824 à Jarnac” — founded in 1824 in Jarnac. Delamain marked its bicentenary through 2024, with events for its main customers and a gathering at its historic house in Jarnac in September.

A family of naturalists, a pale cognac and only one cru.

The house describes the Delamains as nine generations of naturalists, and the family record bears that out. The company calls Henry Delamain, a descendant of James, “a renowned entomologist.” Philippe Delamain, who led the firm in the late nineteenth century, excavated a Merovingian cemetery at Biron, near Pons; the British Museum holds finds from that dig, according to English Wikipedia, which cites the museum’s own biography of him. In 1920, after returning from the First World War, his sons Jacques and Robert Delamain became the sole owners and renamed the firm Delamain et Cie, English Wikipedia says.

Both brothers wrote. Robert, whom the company calls an ethnologist, published a history of cognac. Jacques was an ornithologist: the company says he wrote Why the Birds Sing and turned his property into a bird reserve under the French League for the Protection of Birds, and English Wikipedia says the book won the Montyon Prize of the Académie française. A cousin, Maurice Delamain, owned the Paris publisher Éditions Stock, which published their books, English Wikipedia adds.

The cognac that made the house’s name is Pale & Dry XO. English Wikipedia says Delamain marked the blend’s hundredth anniversary in 2020, and the Bollinger group’s 2024 press release says the cellar master Dominique Touteau reworked it for that centenary. Delamain works only with eaux-de-vie from Grande Champagne, the region’s premier cru, and concentrates on very long ageing; the press release says each eau-de-vie is moved between the house’s twelve cellars in Jarnac as it matures. English Wikipedia says the house makes only cognacs of XO quality and above. In his 2016 book Cognac, the writer Nicholas Faith names Delamain as one of three houses, with Hine and Croizet, to have kept vintage stocks continuously, English Wikipedia says. In 2020 the house added Pléiade, a range of limited single-vintage and single-vineyard cognacs, Le Figaro Vin reported in January 2021.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all brandy and grappa houses: Camus, Hine, Delamain, Otard, Père Magloire, Christian Drouin and Nonino. Brandy and grappa houses in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms 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 village shop to a hotel bar.

A brandy or grappa house’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 spirit 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 spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Champagne family’s cognac, still run by a Delamain descendant.

In January 2017, Le Figaro Vin reported that Société Jacques Bollinger, the family company behind the Champagne house of Bollinger, had taken control of Delamain. English Wikipedia describes the move as Bollinger deepening a longstanding relationship with the house and becoming its majority shareholder, and says Delamain then had fewer than twenty employees and exported to more than seventy countries. The Delamain website links to the Bollinger group in its footer.

The family line continues inside the business. The company says Charles Braastad, a ninth-generation descendant of James Delamain, took over the leadership of the house in 2017. In 2024 he also became cellar master, succeeding Dominique Touteau, who had held the role since 1992, according to the Bollinger group. To mark the bicentenary the two men blended a Dame-Jeanne du Bicentenaire from eaux-de-vie chosen over the years by the house’s last five cellar masters; the group said it would be unveiled in Jarnac that September and sold at auction. Trade press reported that the gilded overlay on the demijohn was made by the Paris jewellery house Goossens. In July 2024 Delamain added L’Oiseau Rare to its permanent range, a cognac named in tribute to Jacques Delamain the ornithologist. Delamain joined the Comité Colbert, the association of French luxury houses, in July 2021, according to the committee’s member list as cited by English Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Delamain shows how a small house can build its identity on one cru, one long-ageing method and a family’s scholarly interests rather than on a single founding myth. Compare Bollinger, the Champagne house of the same family group, and Courvoisier, another cognac house of Jarnac. For this guide we use old cask, pale amber and chalk paper with a classical serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Delamain’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.