L'Encantada Armagnac Showcase – Belfast Whiskey Week 2021

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 25 Jul 2021
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/21/012

Belfast Whiskey Week has always worn its curiosity proudly, and Session 86 — a Showcase tasting with L'Encantada Armagnac — was as fine an example of that open-hearted spirit as any in the 2021 programme. On the afternoon of 25th July, participants sat down with six 50ml samples of vintage Armagnac, ranging from 1983 to 1997, and discovered that the uisce beatha tradition of honouring time in oak belongs to no single nation alone.

About This Event

This tasting includes 6 x 50ml Samples and will take place on the 25th @ 16:00.

This tasting comprises of Armagnac vintages:

1983
1994
1992
1990
1993
1997

Tasting packs will be posted out to you, but may not arrive in time for the tastings. If you wish to collect the pack in Belfast to ensure you have it in time, please contact grace@belfastwhiskeyweek.com after you order.

Looking Back

There is something quietly radical about a whiskey festival making room for Armagnac — and doing it without apology. Session 86 didn't position L'Encantada as an exotic detour or a novelty act. It was presented on equal footing with the finest drams in the programme, because the people behind Belfast Whiskey Week understand that the love of aged, barrel-matured spirit is a duchas — a heritage — that crosses borders and languages. L'Encantada, the celebrated small-batch Armagnac house from the Bas-Armagnac region of Gascony, produces single-vintage releases that are bottled without chill-filtration or added caramel, letting the spirit speak entirely for itself. In that philosophy, at least, they would find kindred souls all across Ulster.

The six vintages on offer — 1983, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1997 — amounted to a kind of liquid seanchas, a storytelling through time. Each bottle carried the memory of a specific harvest, a particular growing season in the southwest of France, decades of quiet transformation in old Gascon oak. Working through them in sequence was less like a conventional tasting and more like leafing through a well-loved family album: familiar in form, full of surprises in detail. The oldest expression, from 1983, arrived with the kind of depth and gravitas that only approaching forty years of patience can confer — dried fruits, beeswax, faded florals, and a finish that lingered long after the glass was set down.

For many attendees, this session offered a genuine revelation. Armagnac occupies a different register to Irish whiskey — grape-based rather than grain, distilled in a continuous column unique to the region, and aged in the damp, earthy cellars of Gascony rather than in the windswept warehouses of Antrim or Derry. And yet the pleasures were recognisable: the warmth, the complexity, the sense that something unhurried and considered had been placed in your hands. It was the kind of cross-cultural encounter that Belfast Whiskey Week does particularly well, and it sat comfortably alongside the more familiar territory explored in sessions like the Bushmills History MasterClass and the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass, which between them traced the long arc of distilling craft on this island.

Logistics in 2021 still carried the particular uncertainty of that moment — tasting packs were posted out to participants, with the honest caveat that postal timing could not be guaranteed, and an option to collect in Belfast for those who preferred certainty over convenience. It was a small but telling detail, a reminder of the care the festival took to make its hybrid format work for everyone, wherever they were joining from. Those who gathered their samples in person would have had the added pleasure of the city itself — Belfast in summer, in the early, tentative relief of things reopening, carried its own atmosphere worth savouring.

Session 86 was, in the best sense, a broadening of horizons. Belfast Whiskey Week has always understood that the sheugh between one tradition and another is narrower than it looks — and that curiosity, a good glass, and a little time are usually enough to cross it. If you want to explore more of what the 2021 festival offered, the Sexton Deconstruction Showcase makes for a fine companion read, or you can browse the full range of festival releases in our BWW collection. Sláinte mhaith.