Whiskey may be the talk of the town right now, but there's another brown spirit out there that's having a helluva year so far: Cognac. Looking at recent Nielsen trends, Cognac sales were up about 2% for the 52 weeks to June 22 in all channels (excluding Washington). But when you take a look at some more recent sales trends for the category they jumped dramatically. In the 13 and 4-week periods Cognac sales catapulted to 8% and 10% growth. The category's volumes were also healthy, up 5.7% for the 13 weeks and 8% for the 4 weeks. That's up from only 0.3% in the 52 weeks.