We had had enough wine to make us philosophical. Or at least to make us think we were being philosophical. "How", said my host, a Cognac producer, as we sat in the warm kitchen of his 16th Century chateau, "how do you give your child a personal sense of history?"

Cognac has come of age

I thought about trying to explain to my nine-year-old son where my 37-year span fits into this crowded century. There has not seemed much point yet in trying to express it in terms of the start of the Vietnam War or the collapse of Soviet Communism.

I have told him that I was born before there was space exploration, let alone space invaders. That not only were there no computer games or compact discs but that even something as humble and low-tech as the non-stick frying pan was a thing of the future.

A Cognac legacy

The Beatles weren't famous, the Spice Girls' parents were probably still at school and the hula-hoop was a relatively recent memory.

My host nodded. "I'm lucky," he said, "my children are grown up, but I have told them that I have laid down some Cognac which will be ready to drink only when their children's children come of age."

Being involved in the slow rhythms of a product that evolves and ages over decades like cognac he explained, tends to give you a different sense of your relationship with the past and the future.

He disappeared for a few moments and returned holding a delicately fluted bottle. The label, spattered with rust-coloured spots of age, was hand-written in a spidery copperplate. Family Reserve 1804, it said.

Vintage from Napoleon's era

Napoleon lends a sense of history to the drink

I began to see his point about the past. Forget looking back to an age before space travel. Here was a spirit bottled before the Battle of Trafalgar at about the time when Trevithick was experimenting with a prototype of the steam locomotive.

My host's predecessors created this vintage just as Napoleon was rounding off a satisfying period of personal growth by crowning himself Emperor of France, marrying Josephine and contemplating invading Britain.

He held his drink up to catch the weak winter sunshine streaming in through the windows as though by gazing into the pale amber glow in the glass he could look back into the past itself.

Protestors close down Cognac

The talk turned to the period of crisis in Cognac. Last year, the small south-western town which gave its name to the drink was closed down as angry producers of the wines from which the spirit is distilled barricaded the roads in and out.

Anywhere else in the world a demonstration to which the protestors turned up in Mercedes would be viewed with some irony. Not in France. Here, the right to protest is sacred, it's treated much more seriously than the right to freedom of movement, and as the farmers closed the town with piles of burning tyres, police officers lounged around in the sunshine watching them.

Whisky more fashionable

They were demanding - and this being France in the end they got - compensation because prices for the wines they produce for which the great Cognac houses are the only customers, are falling. The main reason is that improving technologies and agricultural practises over the last few years have increased output at a time when demand has not been rising.

In many markets, especially with younger drinkers, whisky is simply more fashionable. Attempts to re-market Cognac as a long drink with tonic and ice have foundered on ... well try one yourself and you'll see what I mean.

In other countries, the workings of the market, and the unfathomable way in which the world's tastes evolve, might be seen as a source of sentimental regret, with sympathy for those whose livelihoods are threatened by change.

Way of life worth preserving

Cognac: distilled from grapes in south-western France

The French take a different view. Here you start with the principle that certain ways of life, certain ways of doing things are simply worth preserving. If that means paying cash subsidies to farmers to carry on making wine for Cognac when the market temporarily turns against them ... well, so be it.

The French love the mixture of art and science which produces a drink that links the thin soil of the Charente valley to the high tables of the world. Global free trade and the sanctity of the market economy come a far distant second.

A sense of history

The crisis in Cognac is real enough - workers have been laid off at some of the greatest production houses. But something about the business of producing a drink which can last for centuries induces you to take a rather long-term view of economic difficulty.