three star is a designation of age used on cognac bottles from the 1860s through the 1970s, originally indicating a sipping cognac “well on the road to maturity,” as a 1906 Hennessy advertisement put it. With the shift from selling cognac in barrels to selling it in branded bottles in the second half of the nineteenth century, cognac producers needed a way to indicate the approximate ages of the blends they were selling. In the 1860s, Jas. Hennessy & Co. took to marking their bottles with a neck shield bearing one, two, or three stars. Their meaning was somewhat loose: in 1868, three stars was ten years old, but by 1906, when the company took out advertisements detailing the system, it had come to stand for at least twelve years old, with two stars being nine and one being six.
Hennessy did not trademark the stars, and they were rapidly adopted by other producers, most notably Martell. Otard Dupuy, the other market leader at the time, at first used grapes in place of the stars, but eventually its bottles, too, bore the stars. Unfortunately, the star system, which had no legal force behind it, degraded over the years; by the mid-twentieth century, one star had come to mean a mere two years, with three standing for only six. By the 1970s, the one- and two-star grades were essentially defunct, and three-star was replaced by the new VS designation, which required the cognac to be at least two years old.
See also cognac.
Faith, Nicholas. Cognac. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2014.
“Cognac Brandy” (advertisement). Wexford (Ireland) People, December 19, 1868, 5.
“The Seven Ages of Hennessy’s Brandy” (advertisement). London Times, December 1, 1906, 13.
By: David Wondrich