The Rarity of Armagnac: One of the World's Most Precious Spirits

Armagnac is rare because very little is made, and all of it except Blanche spends at least a year in oak before release. It comes from a small part of Gascony where growers can make the same grapes into wine instead, and it is distilled each winter on about 70 small stills. In a normal year, the BNIA's president says, the whole category sells 3.2 to 3.5 million bottles.

We choose every cask directly from the producers and négociants behind these numbers, so they're the backdrop to every OADE release.

Armagnac production per year

The Bureau National Interprofessionnel de l'Armagnac (BNIA), the category's trade body, counts production in hectoliters of pure alcohol, written hl AP (from the French alcool pur). A hectoliter is 100 liters, and the count treats the spirit as if it were 100% alcohol, so spirit of any strength adds up on the same scale.

According to the BNIA's figures, the 2022–23 distillation campaign produced 10,914 hl AP. The 2023–24 campaign, which closed on March 31, 2024, produced 16,022, a 46% jump. Jérôme Delord, then the BNIA's president, compared it with about 19,000 hl AP in 2018, and the trade body's Ambition Armagnac 2030 plan aimed for 20,000 distilled in 2025.

The vineyard area harvested for Armagnac rose with it, from 1,429 hectares in 2022 to 1,838 hectares for the 2023 vintage.

How much Armagnac is sold each year

The BNIA's figures for 2023 put total shipments at 10,344 hl AP, worth €56 million. Counted in bottles, 1.14 million were sold in France and 1.56 million abroad, across 112 importing countries.

Exports have been under pressure since. In 2024, French sales rose 8% to 1.39 million bottles while exports fell 13%, with the United States and China among the weaker markets. By late 2025, La Dépêche reported that France made up 54% of Armagnac sales, a first since 2018. In 2026, BNIA president Carole Garreau described a normal year as 3.2 to 3.5 million bottles, about 1.6 million of them exported.

How much Armagnac is aging in cellars

For old Armagnac, stock matters more than any single year's distillation. The latest published figure is for the end of 2022: all operators together held 153,779 hl AP, down from 159,236 in 2018. The BNIA tracks stock by compte d'âge (age account), and the split looked like this, with 2018 in parentheses:

• 0 to 3 years: 34% (37%)
• 4 to 9 years: 30% (27%)
• 10 to 19 years: 16% (14%)
• 20 years and older: 20% (22%)

That puts spirit aged 20 years or more at about 30,800 hl AP at the end of 2022. The total stock was about 15 times the volume shipped the following year, which shows how long Armagnac waits in wood before it reaches a bottle.

How big is an average Armagnac producer?

From what we see, most producers fill only a few barrels a year and keep fewer than 250 in their cellars. At that scale, a single cask can be a big part of a year's work.

The category totals point the same way. For 2023, the BNIA counted 537 active producers and 169 active négociants (houses that buy, age, blend, and sell), along with 70 stills in operation; 40 houses owned their own. Spread the 16,022 hl AP distilled in 2023–24 across those 706 operators and you get about 23 hl AP each. That's a simple average, and the trade itself is lopsided: in 2018, négociant houses accounted for 72% of the Armagnac marketed, cooperatives 18%, and independent producers 10%.

Producer counts vary with the source and the year. Our guide to who makes Armagnac compares them and introduces the families and houses behind the numbers.

What limits Armagnac production

Several limits stack up between the vineyard and the bottle.

A small vineyard shared with wine

The BNIA describes 20,000 hectares of vines across the appellation, shared with Côtes de Gascogne wine and Floc de Gascogne, of which 5,200 hectares are identified exclusively for Armagnac. After phylloxera, France's heritage inventory records, only a quarter of a vineyard of about 100,000 hectares was replanted; our Armagnac history guide tells that story. Even today, vines are often a minority in the landscape, and our guide to the Armagnac regions maps where they grow.

Grapes that can become wine instead

A grower can send the same grapes to the winery or to the still. In 2023, the BNIA published cost and price indicators so each operator could decide whether to distill or to make wine without a geographic indication. When distillation jumped in 2023–24, Le Journal du Gers concluded that some producers had chosen to distill more and sell less wine. So Armagnac's volume depends partly on what the wine market pays.

Light wine and capped yields

The base wine is deliberately light, with a natural strength of 7.5% to 12% ABV, and vineyard yields are capped at 120 hectoliters of wine per hectare. The Ministry of Culture inventory puts the ratio at about 100 liters of wine for 15 to 20 liters of Armagnac. We walk through each step in how Armagnac is made.

A winter season and small stills

Distillation must finish by March 31 following the harvest. The stills are small by rule: an Armagnacais column still's boiler may not exceed 40 hectoliters, no still may produce more than 40 hl AP a day, and repasse boilers are generally capped at 30 hectoliters. The BNIA calls the still "traditional artisanal size." Wine is often distilled on the estate, sometimes by a traveling distiller who goes from cellar to cellar. For comparison, Cognac's trade body counted nearly 3,000 stills in production in 2025; the BNIA counted 70 in Armagnac in 2023.

Years in oak and the angels' share

Every year in cask is a year the spirit isn't sold. Armagnac needs at least one year in oak, and a vintage needs at least ten. Meanwhile the angels' share, the spirit lost to evaporation, lowers its strength by about half a degree a year, the BNIA says.

Most of it is young or blended

A third of the end-2022 stock (34%) was three years old or younger. The specification notes that Armagnacs on the market are frequently blends of different ages or grapes, and sometimes vintages, and a blend's stated age refers to its youngest spirit. A single cask from a single year, left alone for decades, is a thin slice of an already small category.

Single casks: at most 600 bottles

Armagnac is traditionally aged in casks called pièces of about 400 to 420 liters. Bottled at cask strength with no water added, a full 420-liter cask could fill at most 600 bottles of 70 cl, and a cask that has given decades to the angels holds less. A bourbon drinker would call it a single-barrel, barrel-proof release, from a producer who may fill only a few barrels in a year.

Armagnac vs. Cognac, Scotch, bourbon, and tequila production

Each industry publishes in its own unit and year, so the table keeps every figure as published and adds a pure-alcohol equivalent only where the source gives the strength.

The two conversions are simple. For Scotch, 1.34 billion bottles of 70 cl at 40% alcohol works out to about 3.75 million hl AP. For tequila, 583.53 million liters at 40% works out to about 2.33 million hl AP. Bourbon barrels are filled at different strengths, so we leave them unconverted, and the Kentucky figures cover one state, not all American whiskey.

Scotch's figure counts exports and tequila's counts production, and neither year matches Armagnac's latest campaign, so we don't offer a ratio. The gap is plain anyway: each runs to millions of hectoliters of pure alcohol, while Armagnac's latest published campaign produced 16,022 hl AP.

Cognac, Armagnac's closest neighbor, harvested 252.9 million bottles' worth in 2025 and held 2.2 billion bottles' worth in oak. Our primer on what Armagnac is explains the rules that separate the two brandies.

Rare Armagnac at OADE

In 2024, Delord summed up the category as "la niche de la niche," the niche of the niche. That's the corner of the spirits world we work in.

When a producer fills only a few barrels a year, each cask we choose is a one-time bottling. Every OADE release is a single barrel at cask strength with no additives, and when it's gone, the next release comes from a different cask. See what we've selected in our current Armagnac releases.