Honfleur Part 3 - From Apple Juice to Calvados

On Bastille Day we all woke up bright and early, ready for yet another day of touring. Most of the passengers departed at 8 am for the D-Day landing site, while the rest of us left at a more leisurely pace through picturesque countryside heading for ‘Le Domaine des Calvados’ (the home of ‘calvados’). This is the region of France where different varieties of apples and even pears are grown then converted to all kinds of drinks, ranging from pure fresh fruit juice to ‘calvados’, a liqueur made from apples that is highly prized in Normandy and is up to about 55% alcohol.

Now I don't drink alcoholic drinks myself, but I do have a chemistry background and have visited quite a number of breweries and wineries to observe their processes for the purpose of writing about them. So I was looking forward to our visit to the Christian Drouin distillery about an hour or so’s drive from Honfleur. And I was not at all disappointed. Its very old buildings and cellars, and the old and new distillation apparatus they use today and have used over the last three generations to produce a range of products were all fascinating. And the current owner was so passionate about everything they do and very proud of all the awards they have won. 

Here is a simple little chemistry lesson for you. When sugars ferment through the action of microscopic yeast organisms, the concentration of alcohol in the liquid can only reach a certain level (less than 10% by volume) before it poisons the organisms and they die. After all, it is their waste product. ‘Why is this so?’, as Julius Sumner Miller would ask? In the presence of water, the yeast organisms metabolise the sugars in the apple juice to obtain energy, producing both carbon dioxide and alcohol as waste products. Normally the carbon dioxide bubbles out of the solution, but the alcohol remains in the solution and is toxic to yeast organisms.

Interestingly, humans also metabolise sugars from our foods to obtain energy. However, this produces carbon dioxide and water and not alcohol. Thank goodness, or we would not survive for very long! The difference is that oxygen is involved in the reaction and is essential to it. (This is why we must breathe in oxygen.) But what you don’t want is oxygen getting into an alcoholic drink like cider, or Voila! You have cider vinegar! 

Anyhow, to make sparkling apple cider, the brewer only needs to seal the bottles at the right time before fermentation is complete. The carbon dioxide produced after that has nowhere to go, so it dissolves in the drink under pressure. Hence the bubbles when the seal is removed!

But to increase the alcohol concentration of a liquid, the liquid has to be distilled. That is, it is heated, and the vapours produced rise, are cooled and collected. This process helps separate alcohol from watery solutions. This will produce products equivalent in alcohol content to a drink like brandy. To produce really high concentrations of alcohol, however, the liquid has to be distilled a second time. This gives you products like calvados.

Two of the products on display at the end of our tour of the distillery and cellars were of particular interest. One was the oldest drink they still have. It was produced in 1939, the year of the outbreak of WW1. The other was bottles containing preserved apples.The apples were much bigger than the necks of the bottles!  How did they get in there? The secret is in one of my photographs. Enjoy! 

Early morning view from my cabin. 

See part of the bridge for a highway behind the caravan park. Usually you could not see all the cables fanning out. There were people camping in many places along the Seine. 

One of the buildings at the distillery.

Where we saw some of the cellars and the display. Behind here was a field containing cattle and beyond that acres of apple trees. 

I think this was the residence of the owners. 

Another part of their lovely gardens.

One view of some outdoor distillation apparatus.

Another view of the same apparatus. 

Some new distillation equipment housed inside a very old building. 

This is the equipment used for a double distillation. 

The furnace for warming up the liquid to distil it.

More of the distillation apparatus. Conditions must be controlled extremely carefully. 

Some of the many awards won by this company. They said that one crucial factor in producing a high quality product is the selection of what varieties of apple go into each product and in what proportion.

If you can see this fairly easily, and can read French, it says that they put bottles around some apples when they start to grow. The apples then grow inside the bottles and are cut off from the stem when just the right size. The alcoholic drink is then added and the bottles are sealed. How smart is that? 

One of the barrels in which the liqueurs are stored. The level of liquid in each barrel is carefully monitored, using the measuring scale shown.

Their oldest bottle of calvados.