As Gimli said, for what use? It all depends on what you are trying to extract. For general use, brandy is a good solvent. It is about 35% alcohol, which is the proportion of ethanol to water herbalists use for most tincture making. For extracting more difficult constituents such as resins you need to raise the ethanol fraction of the solvent, sometimes up to 95%. To get ethanol you need an ethanol license & to get an ethanol license you have to have a darned good reason i.e. be a registered herbalist & then you have to keep a log of your use. So no recreational use there. Anything else I might recommend would be illegal, so let's leave it at that.