Basic Information
Founded: 2002 (1270)
Founder: Beatrice Cointreau
Official website: Official Japanese distributor
Founding History
Founded in 1270 and continuing for more than 21 generations, Frapin is a cognac house with a remarkably long history. The Frapin family owns 240 hectares of vineyards in Grande Champagne, the highest-rated cru in the Cognac region, and makes cognac using only high-quality grapes from its own estate. Since 1967, Frapin XO VIP has been the sole cognac served in British Airways first class. By 1990, the house was selling in 75 countries, and in 2008, Frapin’s Multimillesime became the first cognac selected as Best Spirit in the World by the ISC (International Spirits Challenge). Today, Jean-Pierre Cointreau leads the company as CEO.
Interestingly, Frapin was not continuously famous throughout those 750 years. Around 1900, André Renaud, heir to the 300-year-old cognac house Rémy Martin, married Marie of the Frapin family, who held the rights to the company. Frapin then stopped selling under its own name and supplied its eaux-de-vie exclusively to Rémy Martin. Later, one of Marie’s daughters married into the Cointreau family, famous for its orange liqueur, and in the 1980s the Cointreau company took over Frapin, bringing its name back into the public eye.
Incidentally, the mother of François Rabelais, famous for Gargantua and Pantagruel, was Catherine Frapin, and the house sells several cognacs bearing Rabelais’s name.
Béatrice Cointreau, daughter of the late Max Cointreau, former chairman of Cointreau and an owner of Frapin, launched perfumes and candles as an innovation while serving as Frapin’s managing director.
The person brought in to create the perfumes was David Frossard, also an owner of Frapin, who had previously worked at L’Artisan Parfumeur (in Japanese) and Penhaligon’s (in Japanese), and helped launch brands such as Liquides Imaginaires, Miller Harris, and ELLA K (in Japanese). David learned that they were making an interesting cognac-based fragrance. As he listened more closely, he discovered that Béatrice could not drink cognac and had been wondering whether she could wear it on her skin instead. She had even gone to ISIPCA and created a Frapin perfume, the prototype for the fragrance named 1270.
David was busy at the time, but Béatrice invited him to the château, where he forgot his busy schedule and experienced a sense of time standing still. After touring the château, vineyards, and cellars, he decided to create perfumes for them. This is why so many Frapin fragrances embody the house itself. For example, 1697 was inspired by the scent of the Multimillesime mentioned above.
In Japan, PHAETON Fragrance Longbar is an officially authorized retailer.
