Christian Drouin 1957 Coeur De Lion Calvados

Bottled: 2008.  The tale of the Calvados house began in 1960 when the industrialist Christian Drouin bought the country house Fiefs Sainte Anne and its surrounding orchards in the Normandy countryside. Drouin was from the industrial city of Rouen and looking for a respite deeper into the Normandy countryside. (Rouen is around the same distance from Paris towards the English Channel than Riems is to the East.) So while he may have bought the property for the house, he was nobody’s fool and a decided capitalist; he went about to make the orchards (pardon the pun) bear fruit. Soon after the first harvest he ran the numbers and saw that the price of apples was so low that he paid more to harvest the fruit than he got back from the open market. Looking to make the lowly apple into a value added product he leaned on his local friend Pierre Pivet,who happened to be a well known distiller in the Northern Pays d’Auge region. What started as a business move became a bit of a collector’s obsession and with each successive harvest and distillation the resulting distillate was laid down to age.

As Jason Wilson wrote in the New York Times , at the time of Christian Drouin’s start, there were about 15,000 producers in Calvados, most of them very small scale farmers. In addition to making his own Calvados, Drouin the elder bought up the remaining stocks of his neighbors, some stretching back to before World War II. What the first generation began as an obsession the second generation turned into a business. Christian Drouin Jr. joined his father in the Calvados business and in 1979 decided to aim the direction of their house and business to the export market, as at that time Calvados was something that old men drank with their coffee in the morning (coffee and calva ). With the stocks that his father had built over decades bolstered by the purchased liquids of long gone estates, this represented the coming out of Calvados as something more than a regional drink, and one fit for the finest restaurants and bars. Success came to the house of Drouhin and in 1991 the ‘house’ was transferred to another 17th century estate in Coudray Rabut. In 2013 the then 25 year old Guillaume Drouhin took over the management of the estate and production. With degrees in agriculture and winemaking, the future looks bright for the next generation to come.

Across the orchards that the Drouin family works with there are a total of thirty different varieties of apple trees. Different varieties ripen at different times between late summer and early winter, so the apples are stored until the proper mix of sweet, bittersweet, bitter and acidic has been achieved. The various varieties from each of the categories are blended together and pressed into cider simultaneously. All the cider is pressed at the original farm, with wild yeast fermentation taking place at both properties in a combination of 100+ year-old wooden vats, stainless steel tanks and concrete tanks. All distillation takes place at the new estate using a total of three stills. Pierre Pivet’s original mobile pot still from 1946 is still in use today. There are two stills on the mobile platform, heated by direct fire, and a third, charentes-style still has also added to expand production. Michael Kennel, D&M