#96 Valérie Gamond - Inside Chartreuse: Monks, A Vow Of Silence & The Liqueur They Refuse To Make More Of

Chartreuse is the most sought-after liqueur in the world.

In this episode Valérie Gamond gives the first ever interview from Chartreuse on a podcast. She was born in Voiron, started at the Chartreuse cellars as a 21-year-old summer guide, and thirty-two years later has still never met the monks she works for. We get into the 1605 manuscript handed to the Carthusians in Paris, the 150 years it took to turn it into the Élixir Végétal, and the 130 plants that only three monks in the world can name — one who weighs them into numbered bags at the monastery, two who take them ten kilometres down the valley to the distillery. Valérie explains why the received wisdom about the base spirits is wrong, how the liqueur descends through casks of 50,000, 25,000 and finally 1,200 litres, why the monks had the tannins stripped out of the new vats, and what the mysterious final decoction is doing to the colour. We cover the expulsion of 1903 and the Tarragona years, the rival company that was handed the trademark, the distillery and the market and went bankrupt anyway, the landslide that washed the stock into the river in 1935, and the special bottling sent to Queen Elizabeth II for her coronation. There's the lost stuff too: white Chartreuse, the four pure fruit liqueurs killed off by the decline of the kir, and the Tarragona bottles now trading at prices that mean nobody opens them, which Valérie thinks is a shame. And we get to the heart of it: why the monks capped production at 1.2 million litres when they could sell far more, what happens to the money, and what it means to run a business on behalf of people who have taken a vow of silence and would rather be praying.