There is a particular moment, late in a good dinner, when someone reaches for the cognac. The plates are cleared, the conversation has gone soft at the edges, and out come the bottle and those vast balloon glasses, the ones shaped like goldfish bowls on a stem. Somebody cups one in both hands and swirls it with tremendous ceremony. It looks the part. It is also, almost entirely, the wrong way to do it. Cognac is one of the most rewarding things you can pour after dark, and most of us have spent decades drinking it the hard way.

The glass everyone gets wrong

Start with that balloon, because it is the villain of the piece. The brandy snifter, wide of bowl and narrow of lip, was built to be cradled so the heat of your palm could coax the spirit open. A lovely idea and a poor glass. All that surface area does is send the alcohol straight up your nose, so the first thing you meet is a blast of spirit vapour rather than the fruit and flower hiding underneath. Warm it further in your hands and you only make the fumes worse.

What the trade actually reaches for is a tulip: a smaller glass that draws in at the top, much the same shape a sommelier would hand you for a fine white. It gathers the aromatics and funnels them gently, so you get the dried apricot, the honey, the walnut and the faint waft of cigar box that a good cognac keeps in reserve. A copita, the little stemmed glass they use for sherry, does the job just as well. If all you own is a wine glass, use that before you go anywhere near the balloon.

Warm hands, cool spirit

The other great myth is heat. Somewhere in the black-and-white era it was decided that cognac should be warmed over a candle flame, and the picture stuck fast. Please do not. Gentle warmth from the room is plenty, and direct heat scorches off the delicate top notes, leaving you with little but the burn. If anything, most cognac shows better a degree or two below room temperature, which quietens the alcohol and lets the fruit step forward.

Consider this your permission slip, too: ice is not a crime. A single large cube in a younger cognac opens it up and cools those fumes without drowning the flavour, and a fair few of the great cognac-drinking cities take it exactly this way, as a matter of course. Purists will wince. Let them wince.

Where it comes from, in a sentence or two

Cognac is brandy, but only brandy made in one stretch of western France, twice distilled from thin, sharp white wine and aged in Limousin oak. The region is carved into crus, and the two that matter most are Grande Champagne and Petite Champagne, the chalky heartland whose spirit ages slowly and finishes long. Nothing to do with the sparkling stuff, before anyone asks: champagne here just means open, chalky country. When a label tells you it is built from those two crus, it is quietly telling you it has good bones.

VS, VSOP, XO: the ladder, briefly

The letters on the label are not noise, they are a promise about age. VS means the youngest eau-de-vie in the blend has spent at least two years in oak. VSOP lifts that to four. XO, since the rules changed in 2018, means a minimum of ten. As the age climbs, the spirit travels from bright and grapey towards deep, dried-fruit richness, and the price travels with it.

The practical translation is simple. A VS or a VSOP is your everyday cognac and your mixing cognac. Hennessy VS, the best-selling cognac on earth, is the benchmark most people meet first, and Rémy Martin VSOP, built entirely from those two finest crus, is the sweet spot: a bottle that will sip neat and mix without sulking. Save your XO for the armchair. Rémy Martin XO is a marriage of up to four hundred eaux-de-vie, the oldest around thirty-seven years in cask, and it asks for nothing but a tulip glass and your full attention.

If you are choosing a bottle from scratch rather than choosing a serve, our buyer's guide to cognac walks you through the houses and styles worth knowing.

The long pour: cognac and tonic

Here is the change that would horrify your grandfather and delight everyone under forty: cognac drinks brilliantly long. The fastest-growing way to serve it now is not neat at all but stretched over ice with a good tonic or soda, the same highball logic that rescued whisky from the study and put it back on the bar. Cognac and tonic is the one to try first. Take a younger, livelier bottle, Cognac Philbert VS is ideal and kind on the wallet, build it tall over plenty of ice, add a light tonic and a wide strip of orange peel, and you have a drink with all the aromatic lift of a gin and tonic but a warmer, rounder heart.

From there it is yours to play with. Swap the tonic for ginger ale and a squeeze of lemon and you are most of the way to a Horse's Neck, the old brasserie standby. Top a VSOP with soda and a lemon twist and you have the simplest, most refreshing aperitif in the house. The rule is the same as the glass rule, only in reverse: keep the older bottles for sipping and let the younger ones do the mixing.

Between the neat pour and the long one sits the whole case for a well-stocked shelf: one bottle for the highball and the cocktail, and one for the quiet glass at the end of the night.

A few cocktails worth knowing

Cognac is a founding spirit of the cocktail, not a latecomer to it, and two or three classics are worth having in your hands. The Sidecar is the obvious one: cognac, orange liqueur and lemon, sharp and elegant, the drink that first taught the world brandy could be sophisticated rather than stuffy. The Sazerac, now usually built on rye, began life as a cognac drink, and you can still make the original with a proper old-style bottle. Sazerac de Forge, founded in 1782, was the very brandy that gave the cocktail its name, which is about as close to time travel as a drinks cabinet gets.

And when you cannot be bothered with any of it, there is the nightcap that needs no recipe at all: two fingers of cognac, one ice cube, one comfortable chair. That is a cocktail too, of a sort. The best sort.

What to put beside it

Cognac and pudding are old friends. Dark chocolate is the natural partner, its bitterness meeting the spirit's sweetness halfway. A hard, nutty cheese does better than you would expect. Roasted almonds, a square of salted caramel, a bowl of clementines as the year tips towards Christmas. Nothing clever is required. The spirit has done the work already; you are simply giving it company.

The modern way to an old spirit

So the next time the bottle appears after dinner, change two small things. Pour it into a smaller glass, and stop warming it over anything. Do that and you will taste a cognac you may have owned for years without ever properly meeting it. Then, on some other night, build it tall over ice with tonic and an orange twist, and you will see why a spirit three centuries old suddenly feels like the most modern thing on the bar.

It was never a museum piece. We were just holding the wrong glass.