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.