A History of Grey Goose Vodka

Travel Distilled writes a brief history of Grey Goose Vodka

‘Get the best out of the very best ingredients,’ believes François Thibault, ‘and let the quality speak for itself.’

In 1997, Thibault took two simple ingredients – wheat and water – and from them produced a new vodka that was not merely a premium vodka, it sold for twice the price of Absolut, the most expensive vodka then on the US market. And sell it did, especially when, one year later, it was declared the ‘World’s Best Tasting Vodka’ by the Beverage Testing Institute in Chicago. Grey Goose was born. More remarkably still, it was born in the unlikeliest of places – in the heart of the Cognac region of France.

In fact there are two other ingredients to Grey Goose vodka: François Thibault himself, and the man who came up with the name and the idea for Grey Goose, Sidney Frank.

Thibault was born in Cognac and worked at the Mounier distillery, where he became the maître de chai, or cellar master. It’s a distinguished position in a town that is home to illustrious names like Hennessy, Martell, Rémy Martin, and Baron Otard. You would need to be a fool or a visionary to quit such a job and start to make vodka in Cognac, and many people in the Cognac business thought he was crazy.

So while Thibault created the recipe for Grey Goose, Sidney Frank was the marketing man who sold it. He was an importer of foreign drinks into the USA, including some of the impressive cognacs that Thibault had produced for Mounier. Frank made a fortune by persuading college students to make an obscure German drink called Jägermeister their drink of choice.

Frank was a businessman who went by his instincts. He thought there would be a market for a premium vodka in the USA, but it really would have to be the best vodka in the world if you were going to ask people to pay twice the price. He liked the cognacs that Thibault had created, and persuaded him to use his skills to produce the best vodka possible. The fact that it was produced in Cognac would only add cachet to the drink, and suggest quality.

Thibault consulted a friend of his, who was a pastry chef at one of Paris’s 5-star hotels. He asked him where the best wheat in France could be found. The answer was in the Picardy region, north of Paris, known as ‘the bread basket of France’. The winter wheat grown here, in particular the top-quality Blé Panifiable Supérieur, is as near-perfect as wheat gets and is used by all the top French bakers for both bread and pastries.

After various experiments, Thibault decided that the new vodka should only be distilled once, to preserve the flavor of that wheat. As for the water, that would come from Cognac, from a natural spring in Gensac-la-Pallue, five miles outside the town. The area was already popular with distillers for the purity and slightly sweet nature of its water, which is filtered naturally over limestone.

By devoting the passion and obsession that he had grown up with in Cognac, and when as a young man he had also worked in the wine regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy with the encouragement of his wine-growing father, Thibault produced what Sidney Frank wanted – and what he could sell. In fact when Frank tasted the vodka and tested the market, he faxed an order for 30,000 cases. Thibault and his team thought there was an error in the fax, and he must have meant 3,000 cases.

But Frank not only sold all 30,000 cases quickly, he sold the company to Bacardi seven years later for $2 billion. Grey Goose had laid a golden egg for Frank and Thibault, who still works at Grey Goose in Cognac, combining wheat and water and letting the quality speak for itself.