Age Is Beauty

Palms swayed decorously in the evening breeze. Hundreds of people milled around among the fountains and bougainvilleas on the grounds of the Santa Monica Sheraton Miramar Hotel on July 28, sipping Champagne and nibbling beef and fish tidbits cooked on hot rock griddles.

“This is a pre-event,” explained Greg Roberts. “Or actually, it’s a pre-pre-event.”

Roberts, who’s about as tall as Earvin “Magic” Johnson himself, is the president of Johnson’s charitable organization, and this was the VIP kickoff reception for “A Midsummer Night’s Magic,” an annual Magic Johnson Foundation fund-raiser. The event proper would begin Friday with a Whitney Houston concert and end Sunday with an all-star NBA game.

It was also the American preview of the latest in the recent string of can-you-top-this ultra-spirits. We’ve had super-premium Bourbons and 50-year-old Scotches and hard-ball grappas that cost as much as a suit of clothes. Courvoisier was introducing L’Esprit de Courvoisier, a blend of fantastically old Cognacs, none younger than 70 and some aged more than 200 years.

Johnson was the center of attention, of course, and by the time everybody had lapped up his presence, the event was running close to an hour late. People straggled into the Starlight Ballroom for about 45 minutes, so somebody had to stand at the microphone and warn everybody about eight times not to just start drinking the snifters of Cognac on the tables, though they were relatively every-day Courvoisier: VSOP, Napoleon and X.O. When everybody was seated, Courvoisier’s master blender, Jean-Marc Olivier, led the ballroom in a guided tasting.

And then the great moment arrived. A stream of waiters raced out with snifters of L’Esprit de Courvoisier--just a tablespoon or so in each; this Cognac will retail for about $5,000 a bottle.

It is awesome to drink something so old, though not because it’s, say, six times better than a 35-year-old Cognac (it’s certainly satin-smooth and has a distinctive nose in which you can distinguish apricots, butterscotch and tobacco notes). Cognac is scarcely ever aged more than 50 years in the barrel, so the ancient brandies which went into this blend had spent most of their long lives in glass. Individually, they must have tasted no different than when they were first bottled.

What you’re drinking with something like this is incredible rarity. Olivier has basically raided Courvoisier’s antique collection for a Y2K wine (it will go on sale in December; there will be fewer than 2,000 bottles, each a Lalique crystal decanter). You could sense the extreme age of the brandies blended in L’Esprit de Courvoisier in a resinous scent that lingered in the snifters when they were empty; the ghost of all those years in wood.