I was in Normandy between March 3rd and March 6th 2008. In bitter cold. (March has been a stone month in this corner of Europe; steady snow fell throughout Eastern and Northern Britain on March 23rd — Easter Day.)

Sometimes pretty, sometimes forlorn, with its bare, mistletoe-strewn trees punctuating dancing hills, the Pays d’Auge is a world away from France’s warm south of vineyards, garrigue and olive groves. The comparison is like Minnesota set alongside the Everglades, or the North York Moors proving how little it has in common with Devon’s South Hams. Tough country, in other words, breeding hardy Normands with bone-cracking handshakes: the kind of people who are ready and able to invade England or Sicily at a moment’s notice. Emmanuel Camut, a man who hunts pheasants with bow and arrow, left my extended hand for pulp. His brother Jean-Gabriel was even bigger and stronger. My hire car needed moving in order to enable a delivery lorry could park – so the two pushed it out of the way like an empty cardboard box.

I chose this moment to visit on the basis that most growers would be distilling – and most were. But Calvados stills are unspectacular, and all you are likely to see is a transparent dribble of spirit flowing imperceptibly from one container to another. Perhaps I should have come at apple blossom time? Or for the cider harvest? There’s no perfect moment, but at least those other stations of the year might have been a little warmer. The Camut brothers, of course, insist that post-fermentation is the wrong moment to distil anyway: it should be done, they say, in September, just prior to the apple harvest, so that your receptacles are left empty as briefly as possible. And so that your cider gets at least a year’s age first, and more if possible. (There is very little agreement as to how to make the best Calvados, which I take to be an excellent sign.)

The heart of the Pays d’Auge is Pont-l’Evêque, and as you travel the region you realise that cows, milk, cheese and cereals are every bit as important as to the local economy as Calvados. Cider too. “If you want to know why Calvados isn’t as important as Cognac,” Jérôme Dupont told me, “those other activities are the reason. In Cognac, they had nothing else, so they had to make a success of it. But Normandy has always been a rich area, and we’ve been lazy with Calvados, since we could always get by with cows, milk and cheese.” French sales have dropped by 30% over the last 10 years; Pernod-Ricard used to be the biggest producer, but has now pulled out of the region entirely. The smaller producers are thriving, though, and everyone reports a thirst for Calvados from Russia and Scandinavia. It’s not finished yet, even though production is vastly smaller than it was in its early C20 heyday. Back then, in the aftermath of phylloxera, when a café-Calva was the standard working man’s breakfast drink all over northern France, Calvados and cider production was one-third the size of French wine production.

Take the apples, for example. Dozens of varieties, roughly divided up into bitter, acid (in Britain these are called ‘sharps’), bitter-sweet and sweet, with the bitter (i.e. tannic) varieties being particularly favoured for Calvados production, and acid and bitter-sweet varieties for cider. Most orchards are 70% bitter or bitter-sweet, 20% sweet and 10% acid. Lovely names, as always: Noël des Champs, Douce Moen, Fréquin, Binet Rouge, Damelot, St Martin, Doux de Normandie … There are said to be 800 apple names in Normandy, though many are synonyms. Around 40 varieties are widely used; the appellation regulations cite 50. A tree lives for four decades, and its roots are as deep as the tree is high, which makes apple trees more shallowly rooted than either vines or pear trees. It takes around 10 kg of cider apples to make a good-quality bottle of young Calvados – but, because of losses through evaporation, around 40 kg of cider apples are needed to make a bottle of 30-year-old.

The Pays d’Auge is characterised by its poor, flint-filled clay soil – hostile to wheat or cereals, but welcoming for grass and trees. Thus cows and apples.

One of the biggest local disagreements is whether or not you allow a herd of cows to saunter around your orchard. That, of course, has been the traditional polycultural way. “There’s no better grass-cutter,” says Emmanuel Camut, “and the cows help aerate the soil, keeping the ground and the trees healthy. If you cut the grass by machine, you’ll have to use chemicals.” It does, though, mean that you have to have low-density, standard trees (called hautes tiges) rather than orchards of high-density dwarf trees (basses tiges) – and some growers, like Jérôme Dupont and his father Etienne, don’t like the hygiene implications of an orchard full of cows and their pats, since all the apples are harvested directly from the grass. (In several stages: rodage or picking up fallen apples first, followed by la récolte when the trees are shaken to bring the fully ripe apples down, and finally la troisième passage, to collect the strays.) The authorities seem to be coming down on the side of traditional orchards with standard trees and grazing cattle, and encourage new Calvados orchards to be planted on that basis. One of Camut’s standard (hautes tiges) orchards, complete with the Normandy breed of cows and metal protectors to stop the cows damaging the trees, can be seen in the photograph above. Philippe Terlier of Busnel pointed out that, despite the production differences between low-density standard and high-density dwarf orchards, profitability is about the same, since cows and not Calvados are the primary source of income for most small-scale growers with standard orchards. (There are no cows in dwarf orchards … for obvious reasons. They’d chomp the lot.)

You get 15 to 30 tonnes of apples per hectare per year in a conventional standard orchard, depending on various factors, chiefly the cycle of the tree (since apples fruit well every other year) and the weather at flowering. 25 tons/ha is the average, though orchards of dwarf trees can produce up to five times that amount. The fruit is sorted, washed, diced, stored then pressed, generally today by pneumatic presses (giving 850 litres per tonne compared to 600 litres per tonne with traditional multi-layered square wooden presses). Up 70-75% of each apple is juice, though you’d never know it if you bit into one of them – cider apples taste drily revolting, with a cottony texture and raw, bitter flavours. Yet there’s around 160 g/l of sugar in the pressed juice – a good vintage will produce cider of 6.5%, and a poor one 5%. Acid cider apples have a pH of around 3.2; bitters of up to 4.2. No chaptalisation, and no added yeast, either; Calvados must be made with wild yeast. “Which I think is stupid,” says Jérôme Dupont. Selected yeasts, he says, give very elegant aromas and minimise brett problems.

All Pays d’Auge Calvados must be double-distilled in pot stills (whereas Calvados from Domfrontais, or Calvados tout court, can be continuously distilled). There are lots of tiny variants here, of course, and the shape of the stills varies enormously – though they are all far smaller than malt whisky stills. The bigger producers use gas to fire their stills, but the smaller artisan producers continue to fire with wood. Chez Camut, they use unaged poplar wood for the first distillation (“perfect – it gives you lots of flames”) and 5-year-old apple wood for the second distillation, giving a much quieter, steadier heat. The final distillate emerges at around 70% abv (a higher strength than Armagnac) and is aged at that strength. But in what?

This is another point of sharp disagreement. Some (like Guillaume Drouin and his father Christian) believe in new wood — or casks which have been used for ageing other drinks to give the Calvados a distinctive ‘finish’. These are generally those producers who are trying to create a fine spirit to compete internationally with other fine spirits. The traditionalists, though, abhor new wood; they like their wood as old as possible, so as to leave the ghostly print of apple lingering and lurking as clearly as possible as the years slip by. The Camut brothers and Jean-Roger Groult are both proud of their impeccably maintained, centenarian casks. Most of the spirit is aged as vintage stock, but gets blended with time; only the very best years come through the entire ageing period as vintages — and some producers don’t make vintage spirit at all, considering that blending can always give a finer result. “I prefer blends,” says Didier Bédu of Château du Breuil, with a teasing smile. “With a blend, you express the qualities of your cellarmaster. Vintage is too easy.” The Drouins, for whom vintage is around 30% of sales, would emphatically disagree.

My impression is that, when vintage Calvados is successful, it can be magnificent: hugely characterful, powerfully aromatic and sometimes with a daring and compelling lightness, too. However I also tasted some real flops: if possible, always sample before you buy vintages. Blends are certainly more consistent, and in general have more wealth of flavour and perhaps more harmony, too. But they don’t always have that steak of individual brilliance which you can find in a great vintage.

By the way, if you are hunting for ‘that special vintage’, remember that the date on the bottle is the year of distillation and not the cider vintage – which may well be a blend of two earlier years. Drouin’s vintage 1986 is 33% 1985 cider and 66% 1984 cider.

Fancy buying a place of your own in Normandy and making a little Calvados? Think carefully first – and if you’re over 50, cautions Didier Bédu, forget it. “You plant a tree, and have to wait 10 years before it is fruiting well. Then you distil your Calvados, and have to wait 15 years before it tastes at its best. Accountants don’t understand a 25-year return on investment.” “And every year you’ve lost 4% through evaporation,” adds Guillaume Drouin, with sardonic merriment. “So after 15 years, you’ve lost almost half of what you began with.” Hmmm.
Tasting the Calvados as I travelled from domain to domain was a privilege, but also a challenge. This is a spirit which is never taken with water — though several sips of water between each sample is essential. Even so, my tongue felt like well-hammered steak after half a dozen. Much better to drink each sample slowly, by firelight, over an hour or so, teasing out its nuances — but that, of course, will have to wait for another time.

If you only know cider, you may anticipate sweet-and-sour apple flavours, perhaps with a certain tannic roughness. Forget all of that. No acidity survives distillation; no sweetness either (though in cheaper examples it may be added back); and no tannin. What does survive the metamorphosis is, quite literally, the spirit of the cider — and the fruit. It is as if immolation in the still was a kind of death — and every bottle of Calvados an afterworld. That is why I like to think of the ‘ghostly’ apples which drift about inside Calvados. There is an abstract perfection to their flavour-sketch. It gradually fades with time, of course, but the spirit is also drawing sustenance from the air, the wood, and who knows what else, so it should be complete and harmonious at all points. The least successful Calvados I tried during the visits was, when young, hot, rough and spirity; and when old over-woody and dry. Restraint and delicacy are very great virtues in the creation of fine spirit. Always.

I list the following in approximate order of age. UK agents and distributors are Eaux de Vie for Dupont and Camut (0207 724 5009), Amathus for Château du Breuil (0208 808 4181); McKinley Vintners for Drouin (0207 928 7300); Georges Barbier (0208 852 5801) and Berkmann Wine Cellars (0207 609 4711) for Roger Groult; and Cellartrends (01283 217703) for Boulard. If you’re a Calvados fan, also check out www.calvadosonline.co.uk for mail-order sales of Drouin, Dupont and Groult as well as other top producers like Lemorton and Michel Hubert.

Christian Droin, Blanche de Normandie
Background: A ‘white’ apple spirit for cocktail use (therefore unaged, therefore ineligible for the Calvados AOC). Double distilled with severer than usual spirit cuts to maximise refinement.
Appearance: Transparent.
Aroma: Pretty apple fruit, skin and blossom. Successful and not spirity.
Flavour: Dry, pure, long, clean and appley, with a creamy edge. A success, and drinkable on its own.
Score: 12.5

Christian Drouin, Sélection
Background: This is in fact not from the Pays d’Auge but from the Domfrontais, a neighbouring region further inland where the appellation rules require at least 30% pears and where distillation is in continuous stills. According to Guillaume Drouin, the soil is different, too: “granite and schist with a high iron content, so there is more minerality there than in the Pays d’Auge”. The Drouins think that Domfrontais makes better young spirit than Pays d’Auge.
Appearance: Pale gold.
Aroma: A contrast to the Pays d’Auge aromatic style: fatter, plumper fruit, differently focussed, sandier and softer.
Flavour: Plump, warm, sweet yet dry, concentrated, elegant yet full. Some fire and warmth at end. I can’t see any minerality, and it doesn’t quite have the fresh-fruit charm of Pays d’Auge … but nor does it have the bite and heat of coarse young Pays d’Auge.
Score: 12.5

Roger Groult, Réserve 3 Ans d’Âge
Appearance: Pale gold.
Aroma: Fine and fruity, elegant, clean, floral. No trace of a spirit nip here, despite its youth, suggesting skilled distillation.
Flavour: Tangy, sweet, rich, dense, chewy, fine concentration. The use of wood is truly successful, since the apple flavours shade off into banana and chocolate at the end. Outstanding young spirit. There is the fire of youth in the inner palate but it’s approachable: warming without being rough.
Score: 14.5

Dupont, VSOP
Background: A 6 year-old.
Appearance: Full gold.
Aroma: Complex, full, appley yet richly honeyed, with wax and pollen notes. Spotlessly clean; some blossom: the orchards in spring. Subtle and good.
Flavour: Both sweet and dry, both wood and fruit, with an attractive after-perfume of apple blossom. Clean and lissom; impeccable VSOP.
Score: 14

Christian Drouin, Réserve des Fiefs
Background: This blend is between 5 and 9 years old.
Appearance: Deep lemon yellow.
Aroma: Fresh, softly appley: pleasing and elegant.
Flavour: Full, frank, fresh, firm, gingery, dry, a touch punchy or fiery but full of vivid apple.
Score 13

Ch du Breuil, 8 Ans d’Âge, Réserve du Château
Appearance: Gold-amber.
Aroma: Some wood complexity: notes of vanilla and hazel, with soft apple and creamy sweet almond beneath. No spirit nip.
Flavour: Intense, sweetly creamy, succulent, lush: lots of wood-related excitements here. The ghost of apple perhaps a little faint.
Score: 13.5

Roger Groult, 8 Ans d’Âge
Appearance Full gold.
Aroma: Subtle, mossy, just a touch of white chocolate and coffee: elegant and restrained.
Flavour: Dense, full, sweet (Calvados seems to go through a sweet patch at around eight years old); dry finish, but richly dry. Note once again the impressive and emphatic use of (old) wood chez Groult.
Score: 15.5

Boulard, 12 Ans d’Âge
Appearance: Deep honey gold.
Aromas: Complex, sweet, honeyed, with a touch of tobacco, banana, hazel and crème anglaise. Seductive if not very appley.
Flavour: Rich, full, close-textured. Some sweet apple here with hazel cream
and a touch of banana and more crème anglaise. Despite the richness of the central palate, it has clean, crisp definition and a dry finish.
Score: 13.5

Camut, Assemblage de 12 Ans
Appearance: Full gold.
Aroma: Quiet, mellow, spring water flowing through meadow grass, summer reeds and rushes, honey, a hint of smoke … all tiptoe allusions, but nothing insistent.
Flavour: Deep, dry, rich, aromatic, spiced, pure, long and faintly smoky. There’s a light, elegant purity here; nothing rasps. Texturally very fine, soft and tender.
Score: 16

Ch du Breuil, 15 Ans d’Âge
Appearance: Deep honey-gold.
Aroma: A fine mist of apple; great harmony, softness and smoothness.
Flavour: Succulent, deep, with a note of apple salt creeping in to the mid-palate. Very resonant and apple-fumey towards the finish, which dries somewhat but without heat or acerbity. Smooth to the end, in sum.
Score: 14.5

Roger Groult, 15 Ans d’Âge
Appearance: Deep, full gold.
Aroma: Just a touch of caskiness here; otherwise very mellow and harmonious, smoothly unfolding hints of toffee apple, cream and leaf.
Flavour: Rich, full and textured: the same combination of slightly casky grippiness with the sweet, lush and harmonious central palate suggested by the aroma. Apples still the presiding note. Glowing finish, with a little more depth and penetration than the smooth mid-palate suggested.
Score: 15.5

Camut, Privilège, Assemblage de 18 Ans
Appearance: Tawny gold.
Aroma: Soft, full, felty, suede, but plenty of sweet apple too, bell-clear once you peep behind the curtains. Unshowy, choice and delicate.
Flavour: Intense, deep, rich, succulent and powerfully aromatic: model in every way. Nothing overdone; perfect delicacy, finesse and truth to origins. Masterful.
Score: 17

Ch du Breuil, 20 Ans d’Âge, XO, Réserve des Seigneurs
Appearance: Deep hazel.
Nose: Frankly casky and oxidative: a scent of old woods, hessian and oloroso, but not a lot of ghost apple.
Flavour: Dense, dark, long and authoritative, but finally slightly over-woody, lacking balance and freshness.
Score: 12.5

Dupont, 20 Ans d’Âge
Background: This is reblended every year.
Appearance: Some walnut here.
Aroma: Not so much clear apple as the scent of a night orchard: fruit, flower, wood, grass, dew. Many layered and aromatically fine.
Flavour: Impressive depth and weight on the tongue, almost contriving to suggest salty-sweetness while at the same time being dry, with hints of aniseed and spice, wood and stone, glowing apple. Triggered and complex: the different flavours ignite by turn. A hugely impressive 20-year-old.
Score: 16.5

Boulard, 21 Ans d’Âge
Appearance: Deep honey-brown.
Aroma: Waxy floor-polish and old wood, the gentle apple slowly slipping out of the picture. Cleanly aged, but not hugely detailed.
Flavour: Rich, intense, deep, dark, very chocolately (both black and milk chocolate). This is about as woody as I can take. Exuberant and cleanly crafted spirit with plenty of character.
Score: 13.5

Roger Groult, Vénérable
Background: This blend is about 20 years old.
Appearance: Deep gold.
Aroma: Rich and warm. The apple enrobed: creamy mint and earth, backed by the Groult hallmarks of toffee, and white and dark chocolate.
Flavour: Pure, long, driving, deep, fiery, earthy: the sinews of age evident in the spirit’s flavoury concentration, yet there are plenty of sweet chocolate
edges for pleasure. No fine rancio yet, but lots of elegant, triggered, warm oak vapour. Full-textured; acorn-round. As good as the deeply woody style gets.
Score: 16

1985 Dupont
Appearance: Pale walnut.
Aroma: Attractive scents of plants, moss and mint, freshed by the trickle of well water and spring water. Some savoury notes behind, too. A profoundly satisfying, ‘countryside resumed’ aroma.
Flavour: Full, sweet, balanced and fresh, with a lively apple finished and burnished with a little caramel. Outstanding aromatic qualities; elegant too. Not quite as weighty, thick and salty as the 20 year old from this domain, but purer and more perfumed. Priced at 67 euros from the domain (www. calvados-dupont.com).
Score: 17

Camut, Réserve de Sémainville, Assemblage de 25 Ans
Appearance: Deep tawny gold.
Aroma: Calm, pure, harmonious: apples nestling in the straw.
Flavour: Seamless, soft, invading the mouth with the stealth of an estuary tide coming in on a quiet night. Again the magnificent Camut succulence and harmony much in evidence: the spirit goes down as if it’s 15%, not 40%. Sweet apple scents perfume the finish.
Score: 17

1977 Christian Drouin
Background: Ageing included two years in sherry casks.
Appearance: Deep russet gold.
Aroma: Refined wood, sweetened with apricot and appleskin fruit.
Flavour: Massive concentration, with huge depth and definition. Long, driving flavours of liquorice and prune skin, smoke and umami, rolling around the mouth like thunder in the hills.
Score: 15.5

1973 Christian Drouin
Background: Aged entirely in old casks which had been refreshed with cider from time to time. Since then, Drouin has made more use of new wood, but the quality of this vintage (made with 33% 1972 cider and 66% 1971 cider) suggests that fine Calvados given long ageing really doesn’t need new oak.
Colour: Mid-gold. You wouldn’t guess its age from the colour.
Aroma: Beautiful apple scents streaked with subtle vanilla. Very fine: triggered and complex.
Flavour: Full, round, sweet, succulent, raisiny and complete. Has some of that elusive perfume called ‘rancio’ which characterises all great spirits in old age. Wonderful depth and penetration. The apple trace is now a memory, a fossil print, hidden inside this chamber of tamed fire. Guillaume says that there are “a few thousand bottles left,” which strikes me as impressive husbandry. The price from the domain (contact details on www.coeur-de-lion.com) is 123 euros.
Score: 18

Roger Groult, Âge d’Or
Background: Jean-Roget Groult described this as ‘an older version of Vénérable’.
Colour: Deep gold.
Aroma: Deep, round, profound, yet it has a kind of inner freshness too, a brightness and a blossomy quality: flowers and honey. The cask notes beneath bring a sense of gravity.
Flavour: An intense assault. Real antiquary’s spirit: we’re approaching the medicinal frontier. A depth charge on the tongue: only tiny sips needed. Dry, crisp, shapely and balanced withal.
Score: 17

Camut, Réserve d’Adrian
Background: This is a blend whose average age is around 40 years.
Appearance: Deep gold.
Aroma: Creamy, fine, very harmonious, the scent of the Normandy countryside in summer.
Flavour: Delicacy and precision. No palpable trace of wood here, and the hovering spectral apples are still very much in command. Perfectly pitched between youth and age, just like the human 40-year-old (I seem to remember). Yet another magnificently assured blend.
Score: 17.5

Roger Groult, Réserve Ancestrale
Background: Drawn from old, small casks, stored in attics.
Appearance: Walnut and green.
Aroma: Almost essence-like: old furniture, old staves, old pianos, old books, all the old things which humans treasure. It still manages to be sweet and harmonious, though. I can detect no apple, now; but there’s a sense of apple leaves or old pressed blossoms lurking behind.
Flavour: Lush, deep, grand, dark, salty, chocolatey, full of the sweat of the earth. Time tamed and time-beaten as copper might be beaten. Huge concentration and length. I had the impression that I was sipping liquidised grandfather clocks – or maybe sipping time itself.
Score: 17.5

Camut, Prestige
Background: This is a blend whose average age is over 60 years.
Appearance: Dark hazel.
Aroma: Very finely woody, with an elegant, floral core.
Flavour: Despite its age, the spirit has disarming freshness and aromatic finesse: graceful, stealthy, peppery, perfumed and pure. It’s driving and long, but its aromatic intricacy and wealth is the abiding memory. A deftly controlled performance.
Score: 17.5

Roger Groult, Réserve de Mon Grand Père, “Doyen d’Age”
Background: Even older than the Réserve Ancestrale, and aged in smaller casks still.
Appearance: Walnut and green.
Aroma: Smooth and harmonious, to my surprise: mellow and seamless. You can pick up a mixture of casky notes, earth, vanilla, honey, maybe Virginia tobacco, but the key is the seamlessness. Aromatically, this seems somehow a little lighter and less woody than the Réserve Ancestrale.
Flavour: Elegant, super concentrated, thick, salty and essence-like on the tongue, with colossal aromatic power. The succulent, cask-stiffened cream and honey is freighted with dark spice by now. Wonderful blending material, and a heroic drink in its own right.
Score: 18.5

Camut, Rareté
Background: This is a blend whose average age is more than 70 years. The challenge, according to Emmanuel Camut, is trying to keep its alcohol level up to the appellation minimum of 40% over that length of time.
Appearance: Walnut.
Aroma: Very calm, gentle, sweet, round, refined and floral.
Flavour: There is some palpable wood presence, yet it’s beautifully balanced by a tenacious apple quality: real ghosts! Fine persistence and depth, fragrance and delicacy. Other notes include reeds, rushes, hay, straw and tarte tatin, but everything is beautifully interfolded with everything else, like an origami masterpiece. A time capsule. A stroll in the orchards of the spirit world beyond.
Score: 18.5