The label V.S.O.P. began as a request from a British prince
In 1817 the Prince Regent, the future George IV, asked a cognac house founded by an Irish soldier for a very superior old pale spirit. The phrase had been used for sherry. Hennessy borrowed it, later added star ratings and X.O., and most of the cognac trade followed its lead.
Richard Hennessy came from Killavullen in County Cork and served as an officer in the army of Louis XV. Retiring to the town of Cognac, he began distilling and exporting brandy in 1765, first to Britain and Ireland and soon afterwards to the United States. His son James gave the firm its trading name, Jas Hennessy & Co., in 1813 and appointed Jean Fillioux as master blender. Members of the Fillioux family have held that job ever since.
The house led brandy exports from the 1840s, and by 1860 one in every four bottles of cognac sold abroad was a Hennessy. It was among the first to ship bottles instead of casks, a choice that helped it through the vine blight that devastated French vineyards in the nineteenth century. Maurice Hennessy, the founder's grandson, introduced a star system for grading quality in 1865 and created the X.O. designation in 1870 for long-aged blends.
Kilian Hennessy, who had meant to become a banker, joined his cousin in running the firm in 1944 and turned it into a global brand, travelling across Asia and making his first visit to China in 1946. China has since become the second-largest cognac market. In 1971 he led a merger with Moët & Chandon, and a later tie-up with Louis Vuitton in 1987 created LVMH. He stayed on the advisory board until he died in 2010, aged 103.
Today the company sells around 102 million bottles a year and keeps more than 470,000 casks of aged spirit. In America, where it held about 60 percent of the cognac market in 2017, it has advertised in Black magazines since the 1950s, and its name turns up in over 1,000 songs.
Source: Hennessy
