I found the perfect lunchtime drink in Normandy
Come lunchtime, as the sun cooks the pavements and people of Trouville, in Normandy, northern France, I’m doing the most sensible thing. I’m in Les Vapeurs, an exceptional classic brasserie, on the sheltered harbour of the town.
A few years shy of 100 years old, it’s an establishment that brandishes a menu worthy of a pilgrimage to France. There is fish soup, snails, salads, fish, shellfish and a list of meat dishes including andouillette (that, quite literally, gutsy, fat sausage) and tripe. And, of course, for we are in a traditional patch of France, limited signs of any vegetables.
I’m somewhere in the midst of a glorious lunch and am intensifying my focus on the sensible – indeed essential – thing to do when embarking on a good lunch in this part of the world. I’m about to create what they call “le trou Normand”, literally “a Norman hole”, or as this greedy diner might put it, space for more grub. And the way you do it is thus: you take a glass of Calvados and you drink it. The spirit, a distillation of apple cider, cleanses, burns and settles the stomach, and you’re ready for a few more courses.
In Les Vapeurs, they pour a house Calvados, a measure from a huge bottle into a small glass, and you’re all set. In my case, after some plates of oysters, and then mussels, it’s a shared plate of Brittany sardines, a main course of locally reared veal – escalope de veau Vallée d’Auge – and some chocolate mousse. At which point I might revisit the Calvados idea, but that’s a decision I’ll deal with in due course.
Right now, that Calvados has done a sterling job, the spirit working its digestif magic, not to mention the alcoholic invigoration, buoying up my joie de vivre to further heights.
Such is the alchemy of a glass of Calvados, which has long been my preferred lunchtime spirit. If offered a brandy, I’ve long attempted to defer from cognac to Calvados. It has always seemed a purer, lighter, less heavy and drier option; there seems to be music in the very word “Calvados”.
Which makes it all the more exciting to be in the actual département of Calvados. And to be there, for the first time, on a mission not just to taste the drink but to discover how it’s made.
There’s a Calvados maison not far from Trouville-sur-Mer, a town joined at the hip to Deauville (an elegant place filled with exquisite half-timbered houses with steep roofs, a seafront with a famously long boardwalk and art-deco beach huts, a vast beach and a racecourse). After a brief drive into the countryside you will find Christian Drouin, a house of Calvados founded in the 1960s. It’s now run by Guillaume Drouin, who was handed the reins by his father, Christian junior, in 2004.
“My grandfather, Christian senior, was in the fertiliser business,” he tells me, “and having bought a farm in Normandy with a large number of apple trees, he decided to make Calvados as just a hobby. For the first 20 years of the business, my family didn’t sell a single bottle.”
But in the 1980s, Christian junior moved back from Canada, bringing with him his young family. He took over the farm and decided to turn his father’s pastime of creating exquisite Calvados into a business. Today the firm employs 28 people and its drinks have won scores of gold medals. Theirs is a passion to make a great drink: “we are not racing for volume”, as Guillaume puts it.
The company acts as both maker and négociant, in that it produces Calvados from its own 20 hectares of orchards and buys further apples from 100 hectares owned by independent growers. The resulting spirit is all produced under the name of Christian Drouin.
“We use apples from 35 varieties,” he explains. “The apples range from bitter to bittersweet, sweet and sharp, and with more tannins than an eating apple. The large number of varieties ensures that, each year, if a particular type of apple is blighted, has a problem with insects or has a low yield, it won’t affect the overall quality and volume.”
The apples are not picked from the trees but gathered from the ground, ensuring that they are harvested at their ripest. After harvest, which happens between September and December, the apples are washed, pressed and juiced. Some of that juice is retained and mixed with a young Calvados to make the drink pommeau – a light aperitif that is between 16 and 18 per cent alcohol by volume. The remaining juice is then fermented for cider. And while some of that is retained for sale as Drouin Cider, the rest undergoes two distillations through the still.
At which point, the apple brandy, the Calavados, is made. But it has further journeys to embark upon before bottling. And it’s a journey of two means: wood and age. Across the farm, in various ancient barns and sheds, are barrels, some dating back hundreds of years, within which the spirit is aged and takes on character, both from the flavour of the wood – there are barrels that were once used for whisky, others for sherry – and also from the effects of evaporation (up to 4 per cent of the liquid can be lost over time). “We call that the angel’s share,” says Guillaume.
After merging with another 1960s Calvados maison, Lelouvier, in 2003, Christian Drouin is now a major player in the region.
As we taste a variety of bottles, Guillaume explains how the oak barrels deliver variations of colour, flavour and tannin. “Every day, I wake up wanting to tell the world about the wonders of Calvados,” he tells me, as we taste an 18-year-old, with its scent of almonds, of roasted apples and of glorious mellow complexity.
Back at Les Vapeurs, I spy a Christian Drouin on the list. After the chocolate mousse, little can create a further hole in my tummy, but its smoky elegance bonds me deeper in my love of Calvados, a lunchtime drink without equal.
Lelouvier is available at Boisdale and to purchase at Harrison’s.
