Yes, this is a legal requirement. After distillation the eau-de-vie must age in a wooden barrel and two years after the distillation period on April one, the eau-de-vie gets a ‘compte 2’ and can be called cognac. This cognac is usually a few months older than two years, because the eau-de-vie is usually not distilled exactly on March 31 but somewhere in the period after the harvest and before March 31.
After these two years it is a VS cognac and to become a VSOP it has to age a few years more.
