The Cognac Butler

From August 2023 to April 2025, Cognac-Expert.com operated one of the most specialised AI assistants in the spirits world: The Cognac Butler. This is the story of why we built it, what it could do, and what the query archive taught us about how people actually think about cognac.

What Was The Cognac Butler?

The Cognac Butler was an AI-powered chat assistant built on Cognac-Expert.com’s proprietary knowledge base: years of tasting notes, producer profiles, regional guides, and buying recommendations, made accessible in real-time conversational form. It was a specialist tool grounded in curated, verified cognac expertise, anchored to our own content rather than the broader internet.

Users could type any question in plain language and receive a direct, informed answer. Whether someone wanted to know the difference between a VSOP and an XO, needed a gift recommendation under $100, or wanted to understand why Borderies terroir produces such distinctively floral cognacs, the butler was designed to respond with the kind of knowledge you would expect from a seasoned sommelier or a long-time cognac professional.

It was live for approximately 20 months, during some of the most active early years of public AI adoption, and it attracted questions from cognac drinkers at every level of expertise, across multiple languages and continents.

Why We Built It

The idea grew out of a straightforward observation: cognac is genuinely difficult to navigate, and most of the information available online either oversimplifies or overwhelms.

Cognac has hundreds of producers, four principal quality classifications (VS, VSOP, XO, Hors d’Age), six distinct regional crus (Grande Champagne, Petite Champagne, Borderies, Fins Bois, Bons Bois, Bois Ordinaires), and an enormous range of styles, ages, and price points. A bottle at 30 euros and one at 300 euros can both legally be labelled “Cognac XO” yet occupy entirely different worlds in terms of quality, age, and character.

At Cognac-Expert.com, we had spent years building one of the most comprehensive independent cognac databases on the internet. We knew the questions people were asking because we answered them constantly: by email, in article comments, through our content. In 2023, we asked ourselves what it would take to make all of that knowledge available instantly, 24 hours a day, in a conversational format.

That was the genesis of The Cognac Butler.

How It Worked

The Cognac Butler combined AI language model technology with Cognac-Expert.com’s own accumulated content. Rather than drawing on generic internet training data, it was anchored to our specific, verified knowledge: our reviews, guides, producer pages, and editorial expertise built over many years.

The scope of questions it could engage with was broad:

• Beginner guidance on what cognac is, how it differs from Armagnac or other brandies, and how to read a label and understand the classifications
• Buying recommendations by price range, flavour style, or occasion (for example, “best XO under $100” or “a cognac that drinks well with ice”)
• Tasting profiles describing flavour notes from the dried fruit and spice of Grande Champagne to the softer florals of Borderies
• Production knowledge covering the role of limestone soils in distillation character, the double-distillation process, and the influence of Limousin and Troncais oak on aging
• Brand history for major houses such as Remy Martin, Hine, Martell, and Courvoisier, as well as smaller independent producers including Maxime Trijol, Comandon, and Chateau Montifaud
• Investment perspective on bottles worth collecting based on age, rarity, and brand trajectory
• Cocktail and serving suggestions from classic long drinks to contemporary cognac cocktails

What Made It Distinctive

In 2023, most publicly available AI assistants were general-purpose. The Cognac Butler was deliberately narrow, and that narrowness was its core strength.

Grounded in our database rather than the broader internet, it could provide accurate and specific answers without the hallucinations that affected generalist AI systems when handling niche topics. When a user asked about the difference between Hine H and Hine Rare VSOP, or wanted to know which cognac houses were founded in Jarnac, the butler had solid, curated information to draw from. It could also recognise the limits of its knowledge and avoid guessing, which in a domain as specific as cognac mattered considerably.

What We Learned: Two Years of Real Questions from Real People

After The Cognac Butler was retired, we went back through the complete query archive, covering the full operational period from August 2023 to April 2025, and analysed what people actually asked, and how they asked it. The findings were, in many ways, more revealing than the technology itself.

A different kind of question

The most striking shift we observed was in the register of the questions. When users typed into The Cognac Butler, the phrasing was that of conversation rather than search. A search engine receives “Hennessy VSOP price.” The Cognac Butler received “How much is Hennessy VSOP,” a complete sentence addressed to something the user expected to understand them.

Once users trusted that the butler was listening, the questions became remarkably expressive. Someone asked for a cognac “reminiscent of Christmas.” Another wanted something “with the scent of roses and violets.” One user asked for a bottle “with a bouquet of tropical fruits.” The phrasing was characteristic of what you would say to a sommelier or a knowledgeable friend, shaped by personal desire rather than search strategy. The conversational format gave people permission to ask what they actually wanted to know.

A natural spread of expertise

Three broad user profiles emerged from the query archive, and users moved naturally into each without any prompting from us.

Beginners (roughly 40% of queries) had encountered cognac for the first time, perhaps as a gift or at a bar, and wanted to understand what they were holding. Their questions were foundational: What is VSOP? What does XO mean? What is the difference between cognac and Armagnac?

Enthusiasts (roughly 45%) knew what they liked and were ready to go deeper. They asked comparative, layered questions: What cognacs are similar to Martell Cordon Bleu? How does soil type affect the flavour profile? Can you explain what makes Borderies different? One query that captured this group well was: “I say Growth area Borderies cognac, you answer me…”, a user who had already had a first exchange with the butler, was unsatisfied with the answer, and was pushing back to refine it. They were in genuine dialogue.

Expert-level users (roughly 15%) were collectors, investors, or professionals using the butler as a sounding board. They asked about single-vineyard Borderies expressions, sought guidance on authenticating specific bottles, and wanted analysis of which cognacs were most likely to appreciate in value. This group brought their own deep knowledge to the conversation and expected the butler to meet them at that level.

An international audience

A meaningful share of queries arrived in languages other than English, including German, French, Persian/Dari, Japanese, and Scandinavian languages. There were also Cyrillic-script queries, though some of these arrived garbled due to character encoding issues on certain devices.

The non-English queries were often strikingly sophisticated. One German-language question asked about having a specific cognac bottle formally appraised. The person was asking about valuation, in their own language, with no expectation that this was outside scope. The international audience had found The Cognac Butler and was bringing it serious questions.

Where search falls short

Certain query types fascinated us because they are genuinely poorly served by conventional search.

Questions about which cognacs ship within the US came up repeatedly, in slightly different forms. The practical answer is a labyrinth of state-by-state alcohol shipping laws, retailer licensing, and geographic restrictions. Users were not finding satisfactory answers through standard search, and the frustration was evident in how often the question was rephrased and resubmitted.

“What for Christmas”, short and entirely unspecific, appeared in the logs as a genuine purchase intent signal. Someone had a gift to buy, a budget they had not yet mentioned, and no other constraints. They were asking the butler to do the thinking entirely for them, which is something a product catalogue simply cannot do.

Investment queries followed a similar pattern: “What cognacs appreciate in value?” The person was thinking about cognac as something to own rather than drink. This kind of question works well as the opening of a conversation, and poorly as a search query, because the useful answer depends heavily on follow-up.

When answers fell short

Some of the most revealing moments in the data came from friction points.

One user, after receiving a response they found incomplete, typed back: “Stop it, you didn’t [answer my question].” The expectation had been set: the butler had presented itself as knowledgeable, the user had accepted that framing, and when the answer fell short, the reaction was the same as it might be toward a human assistant who had misunderstood. This reflects something well-documented in AI research. People rapidly assign social norms to AI systems. They thank them, they get frustrated with them, and they rephrase questions with patient persistence because they believe a better answer is available somewhere.

We also logged what we came to call “accidental submits”: garbled fragments that were almost certainly the result of mobile users hitting send before they were ready. Taken together, these told a consistent story about context. People were using The Cognac Butler on their phones, in the middle of real-world encounters with cognac, as a companion for the moment of curiosity rather than as a research tool.

What we took away

Running The Cognac Butler for nearly two years taught us things about our audience that years of web analytics had not. Search data captures what people typed. Conversational data captures what they meant, and often what they felt. The phrasing is looser, more personal, more revealing, because the person is addressing something they expect to understand them rather than optimising for a ranking algorithm.

We also learned that depth of domain knowledge is the real differentiator in this format. Any AI can explain what VSOP means. Answering which VSOP from a small Borderies producer is worth seeking out, or explaining precisely why the limestone-heavy soils of Grande Champagne produce eaux-de-vie with such exceptional aging potential, requires the kind of curated, verified expertise that takes years to build.

The query archive became, in aggregate, a map of everything the internet does not yet explain well about cognac: the places where our content was not thorough enough, the topics we had assumed were covered but were not, the corners of the cognac world that deserved more attention. We are still using that map.

The End of The Cognac Butler

The Cognac Butler was retired in 2025. The AI landscape had shifted considerably over the project’s lifespan: general-purpose AI assistants had improved dramatically in their ability to handle niche topics, and the calculus for maintaining a purpose-built specialist system had changed with it.

What did not change was the value of what we had built and learned. The knowledge, the query data, and the audience insights gathered over two years have been folded back into Cognac-Expert.com, shaping our content strategy, our buying guides, and how we approach the questions cognac lovers actually want answered.

The Legacy

The Cognac Butler confirmed something we already believed: people seek genuine expertise above everything else. Answers that reflect real knowledge of the subject, that understand the difference between a house style and a vintage expression, or can articulate why one producer’s terroir matters. That is what the best conversations with the butler looked like, and it is what we continue to aim for at Cognac-Expert.com.

The knowledge that powered The Cognac Butler lives on in our reviews, buying guides, and producer profiles. If you are exploring cognac, whether you are just beginning or deepening a long-standing passion, you are in the right place.

Cheers.