Boozehound (32 page)

“Usually people who like Calvados like spirits with personality,” Drouin said. “Calvados has a strong personality.” We hear so much about Scotch and cognac, and rightly so. But Calvados provides a similarly sophisticated and complex experience. Calvados can be expensive: Drouin’s Hors d’Age sells for around $80; good vintages can sell from $200 to $500; and I once saw an 1865 Calvados from Huet on the shelf at Au Verger de la Madeleine for €2,800. Still, the basic reserve is much more affordable than cognac or Scotch. For the most part, Calvados is more modest. It’s usually described as “rustic” and having a “big heart,” and though these are clichés, they’re also pretty true. It evolves in the glass as few spirits do. With a good Calvados, you sip and then smell and sip again two minutes later or ten minutes later or twenty minutes later. Each time, it’s as if you’re drinking a different brandy. “If I really want to understand a spirit,” Drouin said, “give me a bottle, two hours, and a good friend.”

Drouin and I spent a good two hours tasting through a wide range of his Calvados. The most memorable were the vintages, particularly the 1973 and the 1963. Of the 1973, Drouin said, “This is a classic. If someone says they want an old-style Calvados, this is it.” As for the 1963, it was honestly one of the strangest, most complex spirits I’d ever tasted—forest, mushroom, spice, but also crisp, tart apple notes, and then a long, mellow finish that lasted in the mouth for hours. It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever sipped, and it shows how significantly aging transforms a spirit. “This is a whole meal in a glass,” Drouin said. “When this was younger, it was probably volatile and unbalanced. But taste it now!” I can only hope to age this well myself. Even Pacult called the 1963 “a bona fide masterpiece … will live long in my memory as one of the greatest spirits/brandy experiences I’ve ever had.”

But Drouin’s finale may have outdone the 1963: we tasted his 1939 vintage. “This is one of the rarest in the world,” Drouin said. “It’s the only Calvados on the market that’s certified from before the Second World War.” That, of course, is because when the region was occupied, whatever the Germans didn’t destroy, they drank.

Later, when I met Drouin’s father, Christian, he told me that Calvados has always been a hard sell in the United States. “When I first started selling Calvados in the States, I would meet veterans who knew it as a harsh spirit,” the elder Drouin said. “They would write letters home about this fierce apple spirit.” I did not doubt this story. When I published a column on Calvados, I received a number of emails from WWII veterans like this one:

I was in a small town in France, near the Belgium border on Christmas Day 1944. (I was with the 17th Airborne Division trudging through the snow to keep the German Army from reaching the Meuse River.) Since the GIs in my squad knew I could speak a few words of French, they asked me to find someone who could get us some wine or other alcoholic spirits to celebrate the occasion. Unfortunately, there were no adult males in the town (due to German murder of civilians) who could fill our request. I asked an eight-year-old boy with whom I became very friendly. I don’t know where he went but he returned with two bottles of Calvados! We had to pay $10 a bottle … but it was worth every penny! One bottle we had to give to our Platoon Leader-Lieutenant. Perhaps, it wasn’t the best Calvados … It was quite strong … but very good.

Still, the younger Drouin seemed excited about the prospects for a new wave of Calvados in the States. “In America,” he said, “people may not know anything about spirits. But at least they’re excited to learn. In France, people think they know everything, but they don’t.”

“I used to think Calvados was something second to wine,” Guillaume said. “To be honest, when I was younger, I was a snob. Then I had some wine friends taste my father’s Calvados, and they were, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe your family makes this. It’s so complex and amazing.’ ” He grabbed a bottle of the 1973 vintage. “Look,” he said. “This is simply more complex than wine, more complex than a Lafite Rothschild.”

Despite the spirit’s sophistication, what struck me most about visiting these distillers in Normandy was their total lack of pretentiousness. At Groult, for instance, Jean-Roger still uses wood fire to fuel the stills. “I learned from my father and he from his father. We like to keep this … 
savoir-faire
.” Groult also uses decades-old barrels that are never quite empty, meaning the rootstock, too, may be decades old.

While I was visiting Groult, Jean-Roger’s sister, Estelle, stopped by the tasting room with an apple pie she had just baked. I ate the pie, and I sipped Groult’s lovely thirty-plus-year-old Doyen d’Age. From the tasting room, we could see apples ripening, ready to fall from the trees. The wood fire burned in the distillery room. The Calvados was aging quietly in the dark rooms as it had for decades. That moment represented everything I love and admire about fine spirits.

So many of the things people value are hard to define. In the fall of 2008, I attended the famed white truffle festival in Alba, Italy. For several days, a friend and I ate truffle shaved on more things than seemed reasonable or necessary (one €35 dish was simply truffle shaved on a baked egg), wandered among the truffle hunters in a very pungent convention center, and debated endlessly how to describe the white-truffle experience. We tossed around the usual descriptors: earthy, woody, rooty, garlicky, foresty. We chuckled about the unfortunate comparison once used by food writer Corby Kummer in
Gourmet
magazine to describe his first taste of truffle as a youth: “It tasted of parts of the body I urgently wanted to know better.” But in the end, we agreed that part of the fungus’s allure was that it defied description.

That’s why, the first time I visited Cognac, I was happy to discover the concept of
rancio
. Rancio is the term for a peculiar flavor that the finest cognac takes on as it ages. It is, of course, impossible to describe. Nutty? Mushroomy? Cheesy? Gary Regan, author of the classic
The Joy of Mixology
, calls rancio “lactic” and likens it to the flavor of soy sauce; I do not disagree, though there also might be hints of toffee or almond. Beyond flavor, rancio also connotes a certain mouthfeel—the way the cognac presents on the tongue and finishes with an almost walnutlike oiliness.

Even for cognac producers, rancio is hard to describe. “It’s a special taste,” said Pascal Dagnaud, the master distiller at the small but highly regarded Ragnaud-Sabourin. “It’s close to caramel, but a little bitter. It tastes a little like a bitter nut. It’s a special taste.”

At Ragnaud-Sabourin and Jean Fillioux, rancio was present in several offerings I tasted, as were dried fruit, spices, and dark chocolate. Rancio was most pronounced in Jean Fillioux’s Cigar Club—and indeed in its Rèserve Familiale—and in Ragnaud-Sabourin’s forty-five-year-old Florilège and Le Paradis, the last a blend of mostly century-old cognac with a small percentage of eau-de-vie that predated the mid-nineteenth-century phylloxera blight that destroyed so many European vineyards. These cognacs were as close to perfection as a distilled spirit could be.

One doesn’t have to go to France to experience rancio, but sadly, in the States there are impediments. Cognac remains a mystery here for a few reasons. First, the really good stuff can be prohibitively priced. Case in point: Le Paradis will set you back about, oh, seven hundred dollars or so. Most of the cognac sold in the United States is either VS or VSOP. In very few cases do cognacs in those categories exhibit the elusive rancio, which generally appears after a decade or more of aging (and which, to me, is what separates a cognac you’d sip from one you’d mix in a cocktail). That is perhaps why boutique producers often do not make a VSOP. If you want to taste a bit of rancio on the cheap, something like Martell Medaillon VSOP or Hine Rare VSOP (both about forty dollars) are good. Otherwise, it might pay to invest eighty dollars or more in a bottle of XO. It’s expensive, but it should last you a long time.

My first visit to Cognac came during strange, jittery times: just as recession was setting in. The “big four” cognac producers—Courvoisier, Hennessy, Martell, and Rémy Martin—had been riding high in recent years, with sales growing about 37 percent between 2001 and 2007. Cognac’s popularity within youthful hip-hop culture generally is credited with the spirit’s resurgence in the United States. In 2008, however, cognac sales stalled, and the larger producers organized what was called the International Cognac Summit to address the changing nature of cognac drinking, specifically the shift from after-dinner sipping among an older generation to its use in cocktails among a younger one. A team of international bartenders created a new cocktail, the Summit, as a symbol of that recognition.

I asked the distillers at Ragnaud-Sabourin and Jean Fillioux how they felt about the new focus on cocktails. Is it a good thing? “We’re not interested in knowing whether it’s a good thing or not,” Dagnaud said.

When I posed the same question to master distiller Pascal Fillioux, he said simply, “I am not a mixologist. I like to drink cognac.”

Other people I met in Cognac expressed unease. “I’m concerned about the future of cognac,” said Véronique Reboul, who with her husband, Alain, grows wine grapes for several large cognac producers. We sat in their courtyard one afternoon, sipped Pineau de Charentes, the local aperitif. The Rebouls were big fans of Texas, having visited fledgling winemakers there in Cognac’s sister city, Denison. There was a Citroën parked in the courtyard with a “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker. “The younger generation is more interested in vodka. They perceive cognac to be Granddad’s alcohol,” said Véronique. “They perceive it to be expensive.” Throughout France, throughout the world, I’d of course heard the same theme.

Back in the mid-2000s, before governments had more important things to worry about, a vodka war raged within the European Union. The so-called Vodka Belt countries of central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia declared that the spirit could be made only from grain or potatoes. A Finnish-backed proposal in the European Parliament sought to block distillers in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France from calling their spirits “vodka” if they used nontraditional ingredients, such as fruit. The stakes were not small. Vodka, after all, is a twelve-billion-dollar worldwide industry.

In the end, the upstart nations prevailed, and they continue to sell their spirits as vodka. “Vodka War Lost,” read the headline in the
Warsaw Voice
. “Would the French like champagne to be distilled from plums, and would the British accept whisky from apricots?” scoffed one Polish parliamentarian, who vowed to fight on.

Normally, stuff like disrespecting terroir gets blamed on Americans. So it was a small relief—a pleasure, really—to see the French get dragged into the fray. As they should have been. Some of the biggest names in the vodka business—Grey Goose, Cîroc, Citadelle—are produced around the legendary French distilling town of Cognac. To be fair, Grey Goose (created in 1997 specifically by Sidney Frank for the American market) and Citadelle are made with a traditional ingredient, wheat. But Cîroc and others use grapes in the distilling process. One can only imagine what sort of war France might wage if someone started bottling and selling a “cognac” from, say, West Virginia (perhaps made from ramps).

Of course, with the wild success of Grey Goose, many others have tried to capture the Cognac vodka magic. In early 2010, Sam’s Club introduced a new vodka called Rue 33. According to Sam’s Club, this vodka is “ultra premium” and “six times distilled and three times filtered.” It is made in Cognac, France, just like Grey Goose, but true to Sam Club’s form, this six-time distilled, ultra-premium vodka will be sold, economy-sized, in 1.75-liter bottles. Now, no matter how much eye-rolling goes on about romantic stories of elderflowers or monks or deer’s blood, they’re all a hell of lot better than, say, a boardroom-driven tale that goes, “Let’s create some booze we can sell two aisles over from the diapers and the kitty litter, in 1.75-liter containers, at the seemingly affordable yet actually ridiculous price point of twenty-eight dollars.”

But vodka is only the tip of the iceberg in Cognac. On one of my trips, I visited EuroWineGate, which most notably produces G’Vine gins as well as vodka. Company director Jean-Sébastien Robicquet is representative of a new generation of distillers who are trying to stay a step ahead of critics and trends. Robicquet worked for Hennessey and Hine before moving into white spirits and developing Cîroc—partnering with P. Diddy as the pitchman. Five years ago, as the vodka market became saturated, he saw an opportunity with gin, which also can be made from varying ingredients.

G’Vine uses green grape flowers, which were being snipped from the vine while I was there, as part of its botanical infusion. That goes against both the gin-making and wine-grape traditions in Cognac. The Rebouls were among the first vineyard owners to allow G’Vine to use their flowers. “I was under a confidentiality agreement, so I didn’t say anything,” Alain Reboul said. “But this is a very small town, and my neighbors were curious and were spying on me. The rumor was that I’d been working for a cosmetic company!”