How Do You Feel About XO Brandies vs XO Cognacs and Armagnacs?

Bargain-Priced Brandies – How Are Raynal, St-Remy, and Vecchia Romagna?

Yo Berserkz,

So I’m browsing the Queen’s Quay LCBO yesterday and notice the usual bargain-priced brandies for less than $30 that I always ignore next to the high-end Vintages XO cognacs and armagnacs going for the $100 range.

However, my eye then catches some new stuff brought in for Xmas. Just in time for Xmas, I noticed three new products:

  • St-Remy XO brandy
  • Raynal XO brandy 15 years
  • Vecchia Romagna Riserva 10 years

These three brandies from France and Italy had a slight uptick to about $35 each. Out of curiosity, I examine them and then do some web research on them and find the following:

  • Vecchia Romagna is Italy’s most popular brandy and the house was in fact established by French cognac makers. I’ve read some particularly good reviews on this brandy.

  • The Raynal XO is a blend of a mere 3 eaux-de-vie aged 15 years or more. While this wouldn’t seem to indicate high quality, I know for a fact Remy Martin only uses 3 eaux-de vie to make their best-selling VSOP and that’s pretty good. So it’s not necessarily the number of eaux-de-vie used (though the more the better for me personally) but rather the quality.

  • St-Remy is produced by Remy Cointreau and Cointreau is a pretty high-quality product. I can’t imagine they would suddenly skimp on the brandy.

So how do you guys feel about these brandies? Has anyone ever tried them? Are they as cheap in quality as they are in price?

Or are these unbelievable bargains I should snap up right away? Can these brandies actually hold their own against my Audry XO cognac and Damblat XO armagnac? Thoughts please.

I picked up some Decourtet XO for $40 recently which is a deal. Very nice XO,