The future will be cognac according to Hennessy

Mr Christophe Navarre's performance as president of Hennessy for the past four years has just earned the 42-year-old Belgian executive a promotion to president of the LVMH Wine and Spirits Group, which Hennessy joined in 1987. By selling more than three million cases of cognac last year - $1.67 billion (#1.96 billion) worth - Mr Navarre obtained a seat on the 14man executive committee of the world's leading luxury conglomerate - and a move from provincial Cognac to Paris.

From June 27th until the 29th, Hennessy will hold its international convention in Dublin - a nod to the Irish origin of Captain Richard Hennessy, who founded the company in Charentes in 1765, as well as a thank you gesture to Hennessy's biggest European market and its Irish distributor of the past 100 years, Edward Dillon & Co. More than 80 per cent of the cognac drunk in Ireland is Hennessy.

One hundred and seventy Hennessy executives from around the world will meet at the Burlington Hotel in Upper Leeson Street.

The Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, Dr Jim McDaid - who does not drink - will attend Hennessy's gala dinner at Dublin Castle. So will the French ambassador, the president of Meridien Hotels, representatives of the Franco-Irish Chamber of Commerce and - Hennessy hopes - the former Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald.

Warning to Mr FitzGerald: Hennessy executives know you write for this newspaper and they think they can persuade you to write about cognac!

Mr Navarre will be the star performer at the convention. He is not without charm but is apparently programmed to use the globalised language of corporate hype. His speech is all about "vision", "values", "prestige", "innovation" and "creativity" - you almost forget he's talking about alcoholic beverages. With such a slick sales pitch, it's not surprising that Hennessy spends more on promotion than on buying the ingredients for its products.

Hennessy's "vision" is decidedly expansionist. If you don't already drink Hennessy, Mr Navarre's implied message goes, you will.

When Mr Navarre took over at Hennessy four years ago, the Cognac region was in trouble, partly because of the financial crisis in Asia. "We needed to shake up the region, the category, the brand," he explains.

In marketing, "the strategy is extremely simple", Mr Navarre continues. "We wanted to keep our consumer base and recruit new consumers, either using existing products like VS, which is popular in the US and Ireland, or creating new products." Mr Navarre introduced 12 new labels, including the relatively inexpensive Pure-White, intended for young people, to be drunk with ice or mixed in long glasses. It sells best in the US, Spain and Asia. Hennessy found it difficult to wean Japanese consumers from whiskey, so it invented Na-Geanna whiskey to steal a few market points from Suntory.

Hennessy's objective is to "initiate" consumers with entrylevel products, then entice them up the price ladder. At the other end of the scale, Mr Navarre created Paradis (£216) and Richard (£936). For the man who has everything, Hennessy made only 2,000 bottles of Timeless, which sells for up to $3,000. "They will all be sold very quickly," Mr Navarre predicts.

But who would pay $3,000 for a bottle of cognac? "People who want the exceptional, the best years of the century," he says.

"There are 2,000 people who will have the good fortune to touch the exceptional."

What Mr Navarre calls "the upstream challenge" meant reducing Hennessy's cost of goods. Cognac costs three to five times as much as whiskey to make, he notes, because it has to be distilled twice and much of the work is done by hand. The region over-produces, so Hennessy was able to drive the price of grapes down by 10 per cent and its competitors - Remy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier - followed. Mr Navarre reduced Hennessy's personnel from 900 to 730 "through social dialogue, in the interest of the brand".

There were early retirements and some were trained by Hennessy to establish their own businesses, he says, insisting that no one was brutally fired. As for his differences with the cognac syndicate BNIC: "I'm fighting for them to defend the quality of cognac and promote its image. They are slow; the world today moves quickly."

The objective of the Dublin convention, Mr Navarre says, "is to remobilise the business behind a clear strategy, strengthen the team around the vision and values of the house of Hennessy". He defines those values as innovation and creation, reminding me that Hennessy was the first to bottle cognac at the beginning of the 19th century, and later invented the pear-shaped XO bottle.

Glancing at his notes, Mr Navarre continues to outline Hennessy "values". Multiculturalism and internationalism translate into the fact they've sold cognac in far-east Asia for more than 100 years, successfully cornered the cognac market among 33.8 million African-Americans and are working on 31.4 million Hispanic Americans.

The "values" list is long and varied: "the art of blending", modernity, sensuality, "quality, quality, quality" and "the spirit of conquest" - a concept dear to LVMH's chairman and chief executive, Mr Bernard Arnault. "We don't sleep on our laurels," Mr Navarre says. "It's the spirit of creating value."

The company's "vision" is growth; "There's no reason why we can't go to four million cases a year," Mr Navarre says.

Hennessy considers itself in competition not only with other cognac makers, but with all makers of premium spirits costing over $20 per bottle. It is first worldwide in this price range - "not in terms of volume, but in terms of value", Mr Navarre stresses. Hennessy makes more money than Jack Daniel's , Chivas Regal, Johnnie Walker Black or Baileys. Consumers are now encouraged to mix cognac with cola, soda or tonic. "We're not imposing anything," Mr Navarre says. "You don't have to drink it from a snifter, sitting in a leather armchair with a cigar."

During his four years at Hennessy, he forbade staff to drink whiskey. His new responsibilities for champagne and wine make my last query - about his favourite drink - a delicate question. Dom Perignon, Mr Navarre says first. Then he relents.

"In the evening, sitting down with a newspaper, Hennessy XO on the rocks, in a whiskey glass."