Along with brown tweed sport jackets with leather elbow patches and the exploits of Evel Knievel, among the more potent symbols of adult masculinity to me, as a boy growing up in Sacramento in the 1970s, were the cabinets of my friends' fathers. (Dad kept his booze in the kitchen cupboard, a less exalted but more practical location, since he did all the cooking.) Beckoning through locked pane doors, the bottles stood as numinous avatars of another world. In the most well-appointed cabinets reclined the seductively curvy and voluptuous silhouette of Hennessy X.O cognac — a kind of totem in glass of the Playboy playmates, whose coveted images my friends and I occasionally were lucky enough to discover stashed away in desk drawers and hidden cardboard boxes. My other vivid boyhood memory of Hennessy is of bottles resting not in locked liquor cabinets but perched in the middle of lazy Susans at Chinese banquets — Mom comes from a well-respected Chinese American family — with requisite bottles of 7-Up for mixer, the perfect accompaniment for such delicacies as shark fin soup and Peking duck.

Now, with the recent release of Hennessy X.O Exclusive Collection Holiday 2007, a special holiday edition of Hennessy's well-respected X.O cognac in a golden adorned decanter and black gift box ($200), I was treated to the good fortune of revisiting a spirit whose mystique is intertwined with my childhood.

The legacy of Hennessy, of course, extends far beyond my boyhood back to 1765, when an Irishman named Richard Hennessy was rewarded for his service as a mercenary to the French king with a nice parcel of land in the town of Cognac in west central France. His trading business soon expanded into the production of fine brandy, worthy of the town's name. Although ownership has changed over the years — the company is now owned by the luxury goods giant Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH) — the Hennessy family has continued to manage the cognac business through seven successive generations, which is extremely rare.

Indeed, maintaining the quality and consistency of any product, let alone a fine cognac, over a 240-year span would be challenging, but Hennessy has enjoyed the remarkable good fortune of seven generations of the Fillioux family as Master Blenders. The current Master Blender, Yann Fillioux, learned the art from his uncle Maurice with the line going back nearly to the company's inception.

Currently, Hennessy dominates the global cognac market, selling 50 million bottles around the world each year, and is the number one selling brand in the United States. Reflective of the brand's enduring popularity, the image of Hennessy is amazingly diverse and versatile — a marketer's dream. Hennessy is the drink of the well-heeled and the powerful. Kings and heads of state drink Hennessy. (Kim Jong-il of North Korea is purported to have a soft spot for the stuff.) Hennessy is the drink of the urbane and debonair. To the dutiful St. Bernard who revives him with brandy after a near fatal avalanche in the Swiss Alps, James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service responds, "Good fellow, but I do wish it had been Hennessy." Hennessy is the drink of rappers and the youth culture and is widely commemorated in hip hop lyrics. "I'm drinking Hennessy while trying to make it last," rapped Tupac. "Pass the Hennessy it gives me energy," says Ice Cube.