Need a 65th birthday gift for a special someone? Here's your bottle!

A 1961 vintage Armagnac from a family that has been distilling in Gascony for four generations, the kind of bottle that turns a birthday or an anniversary into an occasion. It comes from the years when brothers Gaston and Georges Delord ran Delord Frères in Lannepax, two years before Gaston's eldest son Jacques took over in 1963. The family story goes back further still, to 1893, when Prosper Delord worked as a travelling distiller, carting his alembic from farm to farm and turning the local white wine into Armagnac. Today Jacques' sons Sylvain and Jérôme run the house: one tastes and blends, the other takes the bottles out into the world. They keep their oldest vintages, going back to 1900, in glass carboys in a room the family calls the "Paradise," which tells you how seriously they take old Armagnac. Old vintage Armagnac is still one of the spirits world's quieter pleasures. It gets less hype than Cognac, and that makes it more rewarding to find. The family's own advice is to pour it neat and take your time.