Brandy

Brandy is distilled wine. Widen that to distilled fruit and you take in most of the family - apple, pear, plum, cherry. It's the oldest of the mixing spirits and spent most of the twentieth century being thought of as something a grandfather drinks.

• Cognac - from Charente in western France, twice pot-distilled, aged in French oak. The benchmark.
• Armagnac - south-west France, usually column-distilled once, often more rustic and more interesting per dollar.
• Pisco - Chile and Peru, distilled to strength with no water added afterwards and no wood. Peruvian pisco leans on muscat grapes and is aromatic; the two countries disagree about almost everything else concerning it.
• Grappa - Italian, distilled from pomace, the skins and pips left after pressing. Sharp and rustic.

Calvados is apple or pear brandy from Normandy - cider distilled and aged, and a good substitute in a lot of whisky drinks. The rest are eaux-de-vie, French for "water of life": clear, unaged fruit brandies that taste intensely of their fruit and of nothing else.

The same catch as with whisky: the mark describes the youngest component, not the average. A VSOP can hold a lot of much older spirit.

In a cocktail it goes into a Sidecar, a Brandy Alexander, a Sazerac and a Mint Julep - the last two originally, before American whiskey took them over during the brandy shortage that followed phylloxera, the vine louse that wiped out most of Europe's vineyards in the late 1800s.