A Golden Ratio barrel unique in the World
"Though our cellars shelter hundreds of casks, there is one that stirs a particular emotion..."
One day, our faithful cooper friend Valéry came to see our son Alfred, a fine mathematician, to devise a world first for the cellars of Courménil: a barrel with the divine proportions of the Golden Ratio,
so well illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci with his Vitruvian Man.
This barrel is an incredible assembly of complex mathematical symbols, including the golden ratio several times over, the Fibonacci sequence, Apery's constant, etc
Far from being the playthings of brilliant theoreticians, these mathematical formulas are found everywhere in nature, as for example in the perfection of a snail's shell, the arrangement of a flower's petals, but also on the most famous buildings in human History, such as the friezes of the Parthenon, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the rose windows of the Cathedrals,
As if that complexity were not enough, our son alfred amused himself by setting the capacity of this barrel at 987 litres. A curious figure at first sight, but one that is also highly symbolic, being the result of 100 times the number Pi raised to the square. A nod from our son Alfred to Leonardo da Vinci, who before him mastered the complexity of inscribing a square within a circle.
A tribute that Alfred paid him later still by naming his son "Léonard", while his grandfather dedicated to him a Calvados Vintage, cuvée "Léonard
this barrel designed at Courménil has a sacred geometry.
An unforgettable moment, when a journeyman cooper's ancestral brass tools crossed swords with a sophisticated computer program written in python to design together the divine proportions of a perfect barrel.
It is to this majestic vessel, heated over an oak wood fire, that we entrust our most precious vintages of Calvados AOC Pays
The Musée des Gobelins, which gathers the finest pieces of French art, was not mistaken: no sooner had it heard of the existence of this legendary barrel than it ordered the second example for its collections..
To taste this cuvée is to drink a drop of architectural and spiritual perfection.
The dialogue between the liquid, the scrupulously cleft oak and the oxygen is so subtle there, so harmonious, that the Calvados drawn from it reveals an aromatic weave of overwhelming softness,
Its curves, nicknamed "the divine proportion" by Leonardo da Vinci, create a fluid dynamic that is unique within it. The eau-de-vie does not simply rest there: it breathes, it ripples imperceptibly, cradled by flows of energy that no doubt only this magic formula can achieve.
