Boozehound (31 page)

This, of course, was nothing new. One way or another, I always feel stupid when I’m in Paris. I have a long history of it.

The first time I had a “legal” drink was in Paris, on the French Club’s trip to France during my senior year of high school. I finagled my way onto the trip: I hadn’t taken French and knew not one word of French, but there were open slots and a girl I really liked named V. was going. Her boyfriend, however, was not. This was my very first trip outside of the United States, and it surprises me how little I recall of the travel itself. Of course, it was mostly a forgettable tour-bus hell. I do remember being given seventeen minutes at the Louvre and then over two hours at a department store called Printemps. But the most significant thing about this trip was that, though we all were eighteen, or younger, our parents had signed permission slips stating that, given France’s more liberal liquor laws, we were allowed to drink alcoholic beverages—hard to believe in this age of extreme sensitivity to legal liability, but things were a little different in the 1980s. Anyway, the idea was that we students would enjoy a
moderate
amount of wine with dinner, and this would enhance our immersion into French culture. That was the theory.

In practice, here’s what happened: On the morning of our arrival, almost as soon as we checked into our hotel, more than two dozen hormone-crazed teenagers marched to the nearest supermarket, loaded up on beer and vodka, and stashed it in our hotel rooms for later. At dinner that first night, in a bland, overpriced restaurant full of other tour-bus groups, we sipped the obligatory table wine. Then, when our teacher-chaperones suggested some kind of moonlight boat ride on the Seine or whatever, the majority of us did a big pretend yawn—
Oh, the jet lag … I think I need to go back to the hotel
. Luckily, some of the teetotalers agreed to go with the chaperones. The rest of us made a beeline back to the hotel, where a raging party quickly got underway, and within thirty minutes we had the angry hotel manager shouting threats at us.

Our hotel must have been in the Ninth Arrondissement, because it was only a short walk to the notorious nightclub district of Pigalle. After the hotel manager’s threatening outburst, a group of kids started saying, “Dude, let’s go to those bars we saw in Pig Alley!” V. and her friends were going, and so I followed along. I remember wandering through a seedy square with lots of flashing neon and signs for XXX live nude shows and guys playing accordion on the street and shady touts trying to get us to come inside this club or that. It was like nowhere I’d ever been before, but it also wasn’t entirely foreign. Here’s the thing: I was a good, dutiful, honors student. I’d read all the books the teachers had assigned and looked at all the paintings they’d told us to, including the ones which depicted a decadent and depraved Paris. I was not quite eighteen, and still blissfully unaware of so many things—including how awful and touristy Pigalle is—but it all felt immediately like something familiar, somewhere I wanted to be.

This was long before the days when everyone had a digital camera or a Facebook page, so I have no photos of this evening, but I can vividly imagine what our small band of a half dozen high school students from the Jersey suburbs must have looked like: big hair and banana clips and tight acid-washed jeans for the girls; mullets and kelly green varsity jackets and tuck-and-roll jeans for the boys. Inside a random bar—where, I swear to god, they were playing what I now know was Edith Piaf—we ordered beers, and a crew of dodgy middle-aged Frenchmen got very interested in the girls. These guys were classic: thin mustaches and scarves, smoking by inhaling through their noses. “You make kiss with me and I buy you drink,” one said to V.’s friend. She did, and the men started buying us all drinks. Weird drinks: pastis, Suze, Chartreuse. Drinks we’d never heard of. Drinks that forced us to make a face, which of course delighted these middle-aged Frenchmen. After our third pastis, I remember telling V., like a jaded man of the world, “This isn’t so bad; it’s like sambuca.” Soon enough, the Frenchmen got a little grabby, and one of my classmates in his varsity jacket got a little chippy and threatened to kick “some French ass,” and so we decided it was time to leave the bar and return to the hotel.

We walked back through the chaos swirling around Pigalle, in the glow of the pastis. As we walked by a transvestite club, one of the guys in the varsity jackets yelled, “Dude, those girls are guys!”

“Oh, relax, dude,” I said. I had V. on my arm—she’d made it clear the boyfriend at home was no longer an issue, and that what happened in Paris would stay in Paris. All it took was three pastis and we’d thrown off the shackles of our bourgeois suburban existence. We were freakin’ Continental now. If someone had given me a Gauloise, I would have smoked by inhaling through my nose.

Back at the hotel, I crawled into bed with V. as her friend slept in the bed next to us. We kissed and began to strip. Wow, this was going straight from naughty Moulin Rouge to full-on Henry Miller! But within four minutes reality intervened, and the teacher-chaperones were banging on the door. And then I was out in the hallway, half-dressed, being yelled at by the French teacher, who was threatening to send me home. Apparently, our permission slips only covered so much decadence.

After Paris, I headed off to drink Calvados in Normandy, which I’d been looking forward to for a long time. Some years before I’d taken on the spirits beat, near the end of a tedious and unsuccessful autumn work trip, I found myself dining alone in the Italian restaurant of an airport hotel in Lyon, France. It wasn’t a bad restaurant, but neither was it uplifting. I ate a passable lasagna and drank an average Rhone red as I and the other solitary diners silently watched the bar’s television, where a soccer game was mired in a scoreless tie. For days, it had been cold and rainy, and I was pretty depressed.

Then came the dessert menu. I don’t often order dessert, but at that moment I also did not want to go back to my room. So I ordered tarte Tatin. And then, scanning the after-dinner drinks list, I lighted upon Calvados, which at that time I’d never tasted. All I knew was that Calvados was an apple brandy from Normandy, and because I had already been thinking about apples for dessert, I ordered one. The tarte Tatin arrived, and it was okay. Then came the Calvados, a Christian Drouin Hors d’Age. From the initial swirl, sniff, and swallow, the liquid was a revelation to me: love at first sip. Suddenly, I felt warm and happy, and I laughed at myself for being down. I mean, please, I was on a business trip to France, not Des Moines. I must have spent the entire second half of the soccer game with that glass, and I went back to my room a little less lonely.

I tell that anecdote chiefly because I’d like to suggest that more restaurants take better care in developing their after-dinner drinks menus. Where else are people supposed to learn to taste fine, top-end spirits? Yet there frequently is a lack of creativity or even thought put into these offerings. A fine restaurant that would never think of putting a middling bottle on its wine list or a banal drink on its cocktail menu will too often stock the after-dinner menu with boring, overpriced staples. How many have interesting eaux-de-vie, or aged rums, or extra-añejo tequilas, or cask-aged Norwegian aquavits, or amari, or fortified wines that aren’t port or sherry? Perhaps the after-dinner drinks menu is too often left to the sommeliers, many of whom—even some of the best, it must be said—suffer from a lack of spirits knowledge. Maybe the bartender should usurp this job from the sommelier. Anyway, that night in the airport hotel started me on a journey that resulted in Calvados becoming one of my favorite spirits—and perhaps my absolute favorite during the colder months.

I will admit I was predisposed to liking Calvados. I’d already had an apple brandy in my life: New Jersey’s finest homegrown spirit, Laird’s straight apple brandy. I came of age on Laird’s applejack (aka Jersey Lightning), a blend of apple brandy and neutral spirits that is the less expensive cousin of apple brandy. I have a friend, Larry, who grew up near the Laird’s farm and actually visited it on a fourth-grade field trip. And so, when I sip Laird’s apple brandy—even the excellent aged versions—I’m still taken back to concealed flasks at bonfire pep rallies and homecoming games.

I find it unfortunate that applejack and apple brandy are not more widely embraced by contemporary drinkers. Applejack is essential in two classic cocktails, the Jack Rose and the Pink Lady. And back in the eighteenth century, it played a key role in our young nation’s drinking life. A mug of applejack was a fairly common morning tipple for the colonists, and Laird’s, in business since 1780, is the country’s oldest distillery. George Washington wrote the Laird family asking for its applejack recipe, and Abraham Lincoln served applejack for twelve cents a glass in his Springfield, Illinois, tavern.

Although I love Laird’s, once in a while, like our Founding Fathers, I am nagged by the idea that I’m somehow not as cultured as I should be. And so, like Jefferson and Franklin, I began looking toward France—although in this case it was merely to take the next step toward the world’s finest apple brandy. Calvados was declared by Liebling, in
Between Meals
, to be “the best alcohol in the world.” In Liebling’s opinion, Calvados “has a more agreeable bouquet, a warmer touch to the heart, and more outgoing personality than cognac.” Though he did admit that “not everybody has had the advantage of a good early soaking in the blessed liquid.”

I arrived at the Drouin distillery—which produces both the Coeur de Lion and Comte Louis de Lauriston brands—near the town of Pont-l’Évêque on a beautiful September afternoon. Calvados can be produced in only three AOCs in Lower Normandy, where it is distilled from fermented cider that’s pressed from about fifty local apple varieties. Pays d’Auge, where Drouin is located, is considered to be the finest Calvados AOC in Normandy.

Guillaume Drouin, thirty-one years old, is one of several Calvados distillers in Normandy, all of them part of a new generation in their twenties and thirties who have taken the reins of their family distilleries. I also visited thirty-nine-year-old Jérôme Dupont, who will take over for his father at Etienne Dupont, and Jean-Roger Groult, the twenty-seven-year-old heir at Roger Groult. This youth movement in Normandy feels timely and important, especially because Calvados’s reputation has suffered over the years, even in France.

Fifty years ago, there were two thousand Calvados producers. Now there are only about one hundred. In the eighteenth century, Calvados was widely exported, even more so than cognac. But, according to Drouin, King Louis XIV, who was a friend of the cognac industry, made a decree that Calvados could not be exported, and could only be sold in Normandy. By the early twentieth century, 90 percent of Calvados was made by farmers for personal consumption and was drunk unaged. If a farmer did put Calvados in a barrel to age, it was as an investment for his old age, when it would be sold to a big producer. Jérôme Dupont, for instance, talked me about his grandmother inheriting barrels of his grandfather’s Calvados, which were seen as “savings.”

“Calvados has a bad image in France because there was a lot of shitty Calvados on the market for years,” Drouin said. “My father’s generation thinks Calvados is a drink for eighty-year-olds, because that’s what our grandfathers drank. But the generation that takes Calvados in their morning coffee is disappearing. People my age, they have absolutely no opinion on Calvados. So maybe there’s an opportunity there.” I saw the challenge firsthand one night in the nearby seaside town of Trouville, where Drouin and Jean-Roger Groult were pouring Calvados-and-tonics during a party at a trendy bar. Just the week before, the local newspaper had featured the “New Generation of Calvados,” and the producers had cringed because the journalist used the old slang term
calva
, with its connotations of moonshine. But when I asked some young partygoers if calva meant anything to them, they told me, “Nah. Calvados, calva, it doesn’t mean anything except something to drink.” And this, I remind you, was in Normandy.

Drouin took me out into his family’s orchard, where he showed me some of the tiny, odd varieties of apples used to make Calvados. These are not shiny supermarket apples for eating out of hand or baking a pie with. They’re blemished and often bitter tasting—in fact, of the dozens of varieties that grow in Normandy, about 70 percent are bitter or bittersweet. The apples are fermented into cider, which is then distilled twice and put into a barrel to age.

“The way people make cider is very empirical,” Drouin said. “There is no scientific knowledge. I am trained as an oenologist. I’ve been working with wine, but I’ve never faced a challenge like making cider.” Besides working for Barbancourt in Haiti, Drouin had worked as a winemaker in the Languedoc region as well as in Australia and South Africa. So when he returned home, he thought he had Calvados all figured out. “I was so overconfident, I lost half of the cider because I thought I knew what I was doing.” One major mistake is that Drouin used too many sweet varieties in his blend, and his cider lacked the tannins and structure that would protect it against oxidation. After that first year—and after facing the wrath of his father—he began respecting the traditions. At least a little more. He is still applying his training with innovations such as finishing the spirit in port and sherry casks, and even in casks previously used for the fortified wine Banyuls.