Normandy is so close to Paris that wise guys sometimes call it the 21st arrondissement. Which no doubt explains why, in the old days, Normandy’s Calvados, or apple brandy, was the capital’s favorite tipple. To a degree, it still is, not so much in the grand hotels and the restaurants showered with stars, but in the bars, bistros and brasseries frequented by ordinary folk.
A coffee and a glass of Calvados conclude many a jolly Parisian evening.
Calvados resembles the applejack beloved by old-time Yankees, but at its best, after careful aging in wood, it has far greater finesse. The art lies in taming the fire of the newly distilled spirit without losing the distinctive taste of the fruit. Some inferior Calvados is aggressive; some is smooth enough but might have been made of potatoes or grapes instead of apples.
Normandy lies across the channel from England, which the Normans famously conquered in 1066. It is too cold for the successful commercial cultivation of wine grapes. Deprived of the vine, the Normans turned early on to the apple for everyday drinks–spritzy, lightly alcoholic cider, traditionally served cool from a stone pitcher for quaffing with meals, and pungent, decidedly alcoholic Calvados for sipping afterward.
Calvados has never achieved the renown or aristocratic aura of Cognac. Only in recent years has it appeared in stores and restaurants outside France. No less eminent a figure than Marcel Proust, who spent many seaside holidays at Cabourg on the Norman coast, vouched for it in “Remembrance of Things Past.”
For centuries, Calvados was a farmhouse product, handmade by peasants, but in this field as in so many others, the big boys are taking over. Mass-produced brands like Busnel, Boulard and Pere Magloire account for the bulk of the 11 million bottles sold annually, half of them abroad (mostly in Europe, but also in Japan and the United States). Most of this Calvados is young and unsubtle. These are sluggers, not boxers.
But some small-fries persist. One of the best is Marc de Lesdain, a convivial, red-faced farmer who has been distilling since 1959 in the hamlet of Ste.-Foy-de-Montgommery.
On the main highway in Ste.-Foy, there is a big commercial distillery, with tanks visible through a big picture window. To find de Lesdain, you have to cross the railroad tracks and the Vie River and look out for a charming, typically Norman half-timbered house and barn on your left. That’s where he produces, for a mainly regional clientele, in his own still and with the apples from his own 10 acres of trees, a smoky, fruity, perfectly balanced 15-year-old Calvados that is 45 percent alcohol, a few degrees stronger than most.
“You must learn to taste before you distill,” he said. “You have to know how to tell when the fruit is too ripe, when the blend is wrong, how to correct the faults. Every batch through the still has a personality. Now, industrialists run everything, with their technicians and their laboratories. In the alcohol factories, nothing is ever really bad, nothing is ever really good.”
The name Calvados is taken from one of the five departments of Normandy, which extends inland from the seaside resorts of Deauville and Honfleur and the invasion beaches of 1944. It is a countryside of gentle green hills and shallow valleys, with the Virgin or a crucifix at every crossroads, that seems to have lost track of time. The department’s name is said by local people to be a corruption of Salvador, the name of a Spanish man-of-war that was wrecked on the Normandy coast after the defeat of the Armada by the British in 1588. Historians doubt that, but offer no other explanation.
Calvados is distilled from the pressed and fermented juice of particular varieties of apples, just as Cognac is made from grape juice. Cider apples, often small, blotchy and unattractive, are too sour to be eaten with pleasure. They are grouped in four families: sweet, bitter, bittersweet and acid. To make a successful Calvados, juices from several of these are blended before distilling.
Many of the best varieties came originally from the Basque country, farther south, as early as the 13th Century. (Some bear names, like “Bisquet” or “Marin Onfroy,” that refer in one way or another to their origins.)
By law, Calvados can be produced only in the department of Calvados plus all or part of the four other Norman departments–Eure, Manche, Seine-Maritime and Orne. Only cider that reaches a minimum of 4.5 percent alcohol may be distilled; most is between 5 and 6 percent. In the region around Domfront, near the southern edge of the zone, the cider can be made from a mix of pears (as much as 30 percent) and apples; Calvados that includes pears is always labeled as being from Domfront.
The heartland is the Pays d’Auge, which lies on either side of the little Touques River valley, running south from Deauville through Pont-l’Eveque and Lisieux. In this area, narrowly delimited by law, Calvados must be made in a traditional pot still. It is always labeled “Calvados Pays d’Auge.” Elsewhere in the region, more efficient column stills can be used. Their output, which is usually coarser and less sophisticated, is labeled simply “Calvados.”
Why coarser? Partly because the pot still offers greater control, and partly because the pot still’s product takes better to aging in oak casks.
“To be really good,” Waverley Root wrote in “The Food of France,” “Calvados requires aging even more than does Cognac.” He asserts that 15 years in wood is the minimum, and the best producers in the Pays d’Auge agree. But that much age costs the consumer a fancy franc–up to $60 a bottle retail in France and considerably more in the United States.
You can see the whole process here at St.-Cyr, in the rich, deeply rural triangle of farmland between Lisieux, Orbec and Vimoutiers.
This is the headquarters of the uncrowned king of artisanal Calvados, the firm of Roger Groult, one of the few old-style distillers, along with Adrien Camut of La Lande St.-Leger, who produce enough to ship their wares around the world. (Most local people pronounce the name “grew,” but Jean-Pierre Groult, himself, says “grewlt,” with the final consonants faintly audible.)
A dapper, precise fourth-generation distiller, Jean-Pierre Groult uses apples from his own orchards, which cover 65 acres, plus others, about a third of the total, bought from other orchards within six miles of here. They are shaken from the trees each October by a cable linked to a tractor, sorted according to quality and variety and then crushed in a large hydraulic press. The pulp is used to feed livestock, and the liquid is pumped into stainless-steel tanks, where it ferments into cider.
When the moment comes, months later, to make the final product, the cider passes twice through one of Groult’s three alembics, or stills, one of which belonged to his great-grandfather. These handsome, glistening, hammered-copper vessels, heated by wood fires, produce an alcoholic vapor that passes through a swan’s-neck tube and eventually through a coil of tubing immersed in a bath of cold water. That condenses the vapor into a liquid.
The first pass yields what distillers call petites eaux, or little waters, which are 28 percent to 30 percent alcohol. The second yields a rudimentary brandy, 70 percent to 72 percent alcohol. At the end of each run, the harsher first and last parts of the output, called the head and tail, are discarded.
After aging in sheds filled with barrels large and small, and the gradual addition of distilled water, the Calvados loses its astringency and gains body and perfume. It has 40 percent to 45 percent alcohol when it is bottled. Like all spirits and unlike wine, it makes no further improvement while in glass.
Groult sells only blends of various vintages, although other distillers sell single-vintage Calvados. He thinks that they are one-dimensional, that only by blending the distillations of a number of years can maximum richness and complexity be achieved. His own Calvados is available in 3-, 8-, 15-, 20-, 30-, 40- and 50-year-old bottlings, with the stated age the youngest in the blend.
A glass of 20-year-old “calva” makes a refined after-dinner drink, one in which “there is the first happy flush of oak, a lingering taste of fruit and no sting on the palate,” in Groult’s enthusiastic (and accurate) words. But the Normans also use Calvados in a surprising number of ways.
They drink it in the middle of elaborate banquets to revive flagging appetites, much the way fancy-pants American chefs serve sorbets. They call this the trou Normand.
It is an essential ingredient in tripe a la mode de Caen, a classic regional dish. It lends snap to the cream sauce in veal cutlets or chicken Pays d’Auge.
But on my most recent trip around Normandy, the gold star went to a towering Calvados souffle at La Bourride, the Michelin two-star restaurant in Caen. When the waiter served it, he lifted its top, decorated with an apple slice, and poured in a little more Calvados, to make sure the flavor wasn’t too wan.
I barely finished the souffle, but the patron’s wife, with typical Norman solicitude, insisted on pouring me one final glass of Calvados, a 13-year-old, 45-percent beauty from a farmer she knew named Hubert. Its heady scent leaped from the glass to meet my nose, and it was every bit as full-bodied as any Wagnerian soprano.
