Reviving Cognac

Cognac sales have been in decline since 2022, particularly in its two biggest markets, the United States and China. The reasons include tariffs, inflation and tequila. A recent publicity stunt to promote a collaboration between Hennessy and LeBron James fell flat.

If celebrity no longer sells, perhaps the cognac industry could fall back on an old marketing ploy: claiming it’s medicine. In 1918, the Daily Mirror ran the headline ‘Brandy for Influenza’: ‘Arrangements have been made to provide immediately extra supplies of spirits for medicinal purposes during the influenza epidemic.’ During Prohibition, one of the only legal ways to buy alcohol was on prescription.

The idea of medicinal cognac made a return during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the governor of Nairobi, Mike Sonko, distributed care packages that included, among other essentials, small bottles of Hennessy. ‘I think from the research conducted by the World Health Organisation and various organisations,’ Sonko said, ‘it has been believed that alcohol plays a major role in killing the coronavirus.’ He thought the brandy could ‘sanitise’ the throat.

In the US now, not only is the Trump administration dismantling the country’s public health and preparedness infrastructure, championing an anti-science agenda while vaccine-preventable diseases surge, but the new dietary guidelines announced by the health and agriculture secretaries have removed a numerical limit for alcohol consumption. If RFK Jr is determined to take the country back to the days of Calomel and Jalap (in doses) and Dr H.F. Peery’s Dead Shot Vermifuge, why not medicinal brandy too?

As for how to administer it, the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle provide countless examples. In ‘The Speckled Band’, for instance, after Julia Stoner is ‘seized’ by a ‘convulsion’, her stepfather, Dr Grimesby Roylott, ‘poured brandy down her throat and sent for medical aid from the village’.

In ‘The Priory School’, Thorneycroft Huxtable MA PhD collapses immediately on arriving at Baker Street. Even before Dr Watson takes his pulse and diagnoses ‘absolute exhaustion – possibly mere hunger and fatigue’, Holmes has ‘hurried with a cushion for his head’ and Watson has brought ‘brandy for his lips’.

The villain in ‘The Greek Interpreter’ locks Mr Melas and another man in a room with a charcoal brazier. The other man succumbs to carbon monoxide poisoning, but Melas revives ‘with the aid of ammonia and brandy’ (oxygen is now reckoned a better treatment).

In ‘The Empty House’ (the first story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes), it’s Dr Watson’s turn to play the patient:

It appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life. Certainly a grey mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone and the tingling aftertaste of brandy upon my lips.

Cognac can also apparently be used to prevent people losing consciousness in the first place. In ‘The Naval Treaty’, when Holmes presents Percy Phelps of the FO with a successfully retrieved government document, he ‘danced madly about the room … then fell back into an armchair, so limp and exhausted with his own emotions that we had to pour brandy down this throat to keep him from fainting.’

In ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, Holmes directs Watson to give the ‘little rat-faced fellow’ James Ryder a ‘dash of brandy. So! He looks a little more human. What a shrimp it is, to be sure!’ And Victor Hatherley, the hydraulic engineer who survives a murderous cleaver attack in ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, tells Watson: ‘Between your brandy and your bandage, I feel a new man.’ (I could go on.)

Even Holmes himself, on at least one occasion, departs from his usual regimen of tobacco and intravenous cocaine. In ‘The Reigate Squire’, he goes to convalesce at the house of Watson’s ‘old friend Colonel Hayter’. One of the colonel’s neighbours has apparently been burgled. The incident culminates in the culprits trying to strangle Holmes, but Watson, Hayter and a policeman pull them off him. Before explaining the case, Holmes says: ‘I think that I shall help myself to a dash of your brandy, Colonel. My strength had been rather tried of late.’