Grey Goose Altius (700 ml)

When Sidney Frank commissioned Cognac Maître de Chai François Thibault to create Grey Goose in 1997, Thibault refused the industry shortcut of buying in neutral grain spirit — insisting instead on full grain-to-glass control, a discipline borrowed directly from Cognac's appellation culture and unheard of in vodka at the time.

The wheat is blé panifiable supérieur, a soft winter wheat sown each October across three family-farm cooperatives on the flat chalk plains of Picardy, northern France — a 10-month growing cycle (versus six months for summer wheat) that builds a denser starch structure and a distinctly soft, slightly sweet cereal character. Temperatures rarely drop below −5 °C, allowing slow, even maturation.

At the Saint-Quentin distillery, milled wheat undergoes continuous fermentation across six cascading tanks before a single five-column distillation to 96% ABV — a deliberate choice to preserve grain character rather than strip it. The high-proof spirit travels ~600 km south to Gensac-la-Pallue in the Cognac region, where it is blended with artesian spring water drawn from 150 m below the facility, naturally filtered through Champagne limestone and demineralised via double reverse osmosis to pH ~5. A single light cellulose-and-active-carbon polish precedes bottling at 40% ABV with zero additives.

The special feature: where every major competitor pursues maximum neutrality through multiple redistillations, Grey Goose's single-distillation architecture is engineered to leave cracked wheat, faint anise, and mineral freshness intact — a categorical transgression that invented the ultra-premium vodka tier.