Cognac, the drink, has never been more popular: more than 212 million bottles shipped in 2022, a near-record, and celebrities are hitching their names to producers, such as Richard Branson’s blend from Raymond Ragnaud, VS Phantom. Yet its namesake town, a classic city of barely 20,000 people in the southwest of France, is rarely on tourist radars even now—and perhaps that’s a good thing. It’s an antidote to over-touristed sites, and its worldwide name recognition doesn’t translate into an overload of visitors.

But if you’ve seen Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, says Philip Haslett a luxury travel specialist at French Promise, you’ve gotten a glimpse of the landscape here. “It was filmed not far away, and set in a town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, a real cliché of a provincial French town. That’s Cognac.” Still, operators like Haslett are keen to tout the upscale appeal of this town, where there’s now world-class five-star accommodation to match the top-flight tipples produced at the distilleries here.