Cider Made Simple: All About Your New Favorite Drink (2015)

When on the hunt for cider in Normandy, world-wise travelers ignore the photography of tourist boards and travel guides. As I prepared my cider route, I gave the pictures a skeptical glance. Those “quintessential” scenes of bucolic splendor are almost always taken from a quickly disappearing countryside. In the travel material for the Calvados department of Lower Normandy, I assumed the photos of medieval-looking, half-timbered long houses with steeply pitched roofs and attic gables would be as rare as January sun-breaks. I headed off hoping to sight at least one prime example on my travels. (Which, of course, I would immediately photograph, perpetuating the fiction of their quintessentiality.)

In this case, the travel brochures don’t exaggerate. Those amazing old farmhouses are everywhere. I considered pulling off the road at the sight of the first one, and when I saw another converted into a restaurant a little farther on, I stopped in for lunch. I wasn’t taking any chances. As I drove on, not only did the farmhouses begin to proliferate, it actually became difficult to see any other structures. I’d been in Normandy an hour, and already I’d feasted on French food, cider, and the unbelievable local architecture.

But what the travel brochures don’t mention is something even more interesting for the cider tourist. Many of the buildings were built as dwellings, but a lot of them were also built to be pressoirs—press-houses for making cider and Calvados (a kind of apple brandy). These old buildings, dating from the seventeenth century onward, were constructed from the material available to people then—wood, straw and mud, and thatch. According to locals, the reason they’re long and narrow had to do with beam lengths. The longest beams were expensive and were used in more elegant chateaux; the farmers had access only to shorter beams, which described the full width of the building. If a farmer wanted to expand, he just added more length to one end. With sharply peaked roofs, they have attics ideal for storing harvested apples before the press, and the lower portion accommodates oaken casks of fermenting cider and aging liquor.

After my lunch, I drove straight to Glos, not far from Lisieux, to meet Cyril Zangs at his home. Guess what kind of structure it was? We spoke for a few minutes in his kitchen, and then M. Zangs showed me how the rooms were laid out. The buildings are the width of one room, so the houses are segmented—kitchen, living room, bedroom, and so on, rooms adjacent to one another running in a line.

We drove to his cidery in a nearby town, and—guess what kind of building that was? He brushed off my amazement—these old buildings are a dime a dozen, he said, and he was able to rent this cheaply. His cidery was an elegant one with a brick foundation and scalloped roof, and it was surrounded by wood-fenced fields, which were themselves dotted with old farmhouses of a similar vintage.

The features particular to Normandy didn’t stop there. His press was parked out front. “Parked,” because it was of a mobile design typical of the region. Every farmer may have made cider and Calvados, but they didn’t all own their own presses. Instead, each fall, an owner of the press would drive around, farm to farm, offering his services—this was the practice for generations. Neither did most of them own their own stills. I would see a related contraption the next day in Coudray-Rabut at the Drouin cidery, but instead of a press, it was an old wheeled still that farmers would have used to turn a portion of their cider into Calvados.

It’s not wrong to think of Normandy as cider country, but it’s incomplete. Normandy has an apple ecosystem that begins with cider but continues on to Calvados and Pommeau, an aged blend of Calvados and apple juice. Guillaume Drouin, a third-generation cider-maker at the Christian Drouin distillery, speculates that just a few decades ago there were tens of thousands of farmhouse producers. “Calvados was really a farm product. Every farmer was making his own Calvados even fifty years ago.” The farmers harvested their apples and made cider and later distilled it. Until very recently, in every pressoir in the department, farmers had stocks of fresh cider and barrels of aging Calvados. The farmers didn’t think of themselves as cider-makers or distillers, they were farmers, and cider and Calvados were just part of their produce.

Cidre Bouché of France

The ciders of Normandy and Brittany are—well, they’re French. That is to say, they are subtle and sophisticated, complex, and accomplished. Most of the traditional farmhouse ciders are made through a process that leaves them light on alcohol (2.5 to 4.5 percent), balancing rounded residual sugars with tannins. Naturally fermented, many have a touch of blue cheese as well. A new breed of cider-maker led by Cyril Zangs and Eric Bordelet takes cues from the winemakers to the south, producing stronger, drier products that find their way into the finer restaurants of Paris. French ciders are nearly always bottled sparkling, and pour from corked champagne bottles (cidre bouché refers to corked cider) with joyful effervescence.

Once I left the Zangs cidery and was driving the roads through lush farmland, I started to think about all the half-timbered buildings I could see. How many of them had once been put to the service of the orchards? Apples and their assorted nectars are so central to this region, I almost wondered if they didn’t ooze from the earth.

Northern France has been home to orchards since at least Roman times, but up until the mid-fourteenth century, it was, like the rest of France, predominantly wine country. But then the climate of Europe went through a mini ice age, and wine grapes withered in the cold. Farmers in Normandy and Brittany replaced their vines with trees, and that’s when the north truly became the place of apples. Calvados came a bit later, but by the early 1600s it was established firmly enough to have its own guild. The orchards of northern France flourished and grew to be among the world’s largest, and cider and Calvados became fixtures of the local scene.

Fortune played an interesting role in cider’s more recent history. It received an unexpected boost in the mid-nineteenth century when the phylloxera aphid arrived to ravage French vineyards. When the wine stocks plummeted, cider stepped in. The orchards spread, and an industry was born. Researchers looked into the science of cider, and France produced a number of technical manuals—more sophisticated than the material written about wine—that are still in use today. The U.S. government commissioned a report on cider making at the turn of the twentieth century, and the author, William Alwood, reported that at the time, “France, by reason of the extent of its manufacture, is easily the leading cider country of the world.”

Just at the moment cider was becoming a legitimate rival to French wine, though, fortune swung back against it. The first half of the twentieth century brought two World Wars to France, and both helped buckle cider production. During WWI, the government requisitioned alcohol to use for munitions production, dealing the first blow. The second was far graver. To Americans, Normandy isn’t known for apples or native son William the Conqueror—it’s known for the battlefields of the Allied invasion, which touched down on the coastal edge of cider country. And it wasn’t just the Allies—wine fought its own war. As vintners got control of the aphid blight, the French government gave it a big boost, restricting Calvados sales and banning Pommeau. It was never likely that France would permanently eschew wine in favor of cider, but this series of setbacks settled the matter.

Asbestos Sack Filter

One of the many scientific innovations of the late nineteenth century was the French asbestos sack filter, which, as William Alwood reported, produced a cider “clear and limpid as it goes into the cask.” He described it as “a fairly closely woven asbestos sack, ten or twelve inches in diameter.” The open end of the sack was tied around a tube that was placed in the cider vat and attached to a pump. The must was drawn through “the asbestos sack … largely freeing the [cider] from floating particles of whatever nature.”

Thankfully, the asbestos sack filter is no longer in use in French cideries.

By midcentury, the cider boomlet was over. Wine had been restored to preeminence, and cider went back to its regional status. Where it once seemed as if cider might become organized into a proper industry, it instead fell back to the farm, where makers were small and informal. Wine is again the fuel that powers French culture, cider a mostly forgotten rival. It almost didn’t go that way, though. How would the world differ if France were famous for cider instead?

I would argue that of all the world’s ciders—supermarket varieties included—none have a broader appeal than the joyfully sparkling farmhouse ciders of France. Like English ciders, they’re built around bitter apple varieties, but they’re not bitter. Cider-makers ferment them to leave much of their sugars behind. It results in ciders that are at once sweet and full, yet also structured and complex. Modern palates tend to like lively beverages, and they’re all that. Finally, tucked in around the edges are subtle hints of their rustic origins—the fragrance of orchard floor and blue cheese, herbs and flowers, perhaps some wood or spice. They appeal equally to those who have never tasted cider and those who have spent a lifetime enjoying them.

Yet making a crowd-pleaser that both connoisseurs and neophytes admire is no easy business. My second visit was to the Christian Drouin cidery. Guillaume Drouin had wanted to take me into the orchards, but it was pouring rain, and so we’d hustled instead past them and into the new and modern open-air facility situated incongruously in the midst of old apple trees. “If you think about a traditional cider, it is made to be a problem,” he said. “You put sugar, yeast, bacteria all together into the bottle and then you put a cork on it. And then you pray.” He had just finished giving me a tour, and describing the cider-making process, apple to cork, seemed to leave him slightly agitated. What he was aiming for was a deliciously carefree drink, and yet getting there was like juggling knives. The grinder, press, and fermenters suddenly seemed menacing.

Drouin is a dapper man who looks younger than his thirty-six years. He has swept-back hair and wears a kind of three-quarter-length frock coat. His family is from Normandy, but his grandfather, who started the business, was not a farmer. He owned a successful fertilizer company, and in 1960 purchased a sixteen-hectare [forty-acre] farm with apple orchards. He found that selling the fruit wasn’t profitable, so he decided he’d try his hand at making Calvados. Because he had other income, Christian Drouin didn’t need the brandy to earn him money immediately—a rare luxury that allowed the distillery to establish an impressive reserve of aging stock over the course of two decades. “Calvados is like a bank that you have to add to every year,” says his grandson. “Maybe fifteen years later you will take some money out of that project.”

The company also made cider, but until Guillaume arrived, it was a secondary business. Both his grandfather and father (also named Christian) were focused on Calvados. That product starts out as cider, but good Calvados is made in the still and the cask. Cider requires different apples (and more of them) and a different balance of elements; it’s the final rather than first stage of the process. Under Guillaume’s direction, the name Christian Drouin has become as notable for cider as it is for Calvados.

The differences start in the orchard. Counterintuitively, Calvados begins with lower-alcohol cider. Starting with low-alcohol cider requires more concentration during distillation, and that means more complexity. To get lower-alcohol cider, Calvados requires different apples than the cider that will be bottled for consumption. In order to get the right mixture of apples for both cider and Calvados, Drouin farms twenty hectares and buys fruit from another twenty hectares on adjacent land (about one hundred acres in total). The names of some of the most important varieties rolled off his tongue: Bedan, Mettais, Binet Rouge, Saint Martin, Moulin à vent, Frequin, Rambault. Like the English cider-makers I spoke to, Drouin favors larger trees called “high stem” (haute tige) so they can graze cattle underneath—and like the English cider-makers, this means they don’t use pesticides or fertilizers. He explains, “The cows, they love the apples. In summer, they look at the apples growing and from the end of August they start shaking the trees as much as they can. When there’s a worm, when the fruit starts to perish, it’s going to fall first. So the cows eat them and they cut the grass. They’re very useful.” He takes a similarly organic approach to harvest, waiting for the apples to fall themselves (once the cows have been relocated to a different pasture), and picking the fruit off the ground. He feels that shaking a tree once and collecting the apples all together will result in some underripe fruit. “I will go under the trees like three, four times to pick it completely.”

Terroir

This region is known as the Pays d’Auge, famous not only for cider, but cheese (Pont l’Évêque and Camembert) and horses. Hills roll toward the sea to the north and the picturesque towns of Deauville and Honfleur, and their slopes are blanketed with orchards. Some of the best-known French cider-makers have trees within twenty kilometers of the town of Lisieux at the center of Pays d’Auge—Dupont, Le Père Jules, and Manoir de Grandouet, along with Zangs and Drouin.

This is France, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether cider-makers thought in terms of terroir. In wine-making, “terroir” is an accepted if slippery concept. It means, roughly, the natural environment that contributes to wine—the climate, soil, and sunlight. Although cider-makers elsewhere believed these factors inflected their ciders, few regarded it with the sense of mysticism it seems to receive among wine aficionados. Guillaume Drouin isn’t averse to the concept of terroir, but doesn’t think it is a major factor in cider’s final flavor profile. Cyril Zangs, however, makes a strong case by relaying an interesting discovery he made about the role of terroir.

Like Drouin, he wasn’t particularly concerned about terroir—until his cousin approached him about a coastal orchard on the steep slopes overlooking the sea. She wondered if Zangs would be interested in using the apples in his cider. He wasn’t—it was thirty-five kilometers away. Nevertheless, he visited, finding old, overgrown trees when he arrived. They were cider apples, and while they were tromping around, Zangs recognized one he knew. He plucked an apple and took a bite but was surprised by the flavor. “I tasted it as we spoke and after three bites [I realized] it is very sharp like glass.” The apples from that orchard make his This Side Up cider, which has a distinctive mineral quality, a “sharpness” Zangs attributes to terroir.

“I talked with winemakers and they tell me, ‘no, no, it doesn’t come from the sea.’ The sea may make the trees very clean, that’s true. But it comes from the soil.” At first, he believed this meant the rocky soil and steep slope, but when he began filling in holes in the orchard where trees had died, he discovered that it had only very shallow topsoil. But because it was such an old orchard, that topsoil had grown richer. There were wild plants and mushrooms growing throughout the orchard, and despite the shallow soil, the trees pulled their nutrients from that lush layer of life. His conclusion? “Everything happens in the earth. The terroir is not obligatory with rocks and special soil; it can also happen in the earth. You could make a terroir; bring the earth back to what it should be.”

Wine and cider are different; wine depends on fewer grape varieties and the terroir is more evident in the expression of the fruit. Ciders are made from blends of many types of apples and this has the effect of blending away subtle elements of terroir. Nevertheless, there is a terroir of apples, and it is revealed when you try Zangs’s two ciders next to each other.

French Cider

These are good examples of the range of French ciders available in the United States.

CHRISTIAN DROUIN PAYS D’AUGE is a supple cider, with earthy, herbal notes and nutty tannins balanced by silky apple flavor; the company’s Poiré is even more silky and sweet.

CLOS DES DUCS is one of the rare Breton ciders available; it’s a funky farmhouse cider with a steely tang underneath a batting of soft sweetness.

DOMAINE DUPONT CIDRE BOUCHÉ has an incredible blue cheese and orchard floor nose, lip-smacking tannins, and a round, bubbly body.

ERIC BORDELET SIDRE TENDRE is a great introduction to French cider; it is approachably sweet and effervescent, but has soft, cinnamon tannins, blue cheese, and a hint of smoke.

LES PÈRE JULES BRUT is a good example of the typical ciders of the region, rustic but approachable.

CYRIL ZANGS BRUT and THIS SIDE UP contrast with other French ciders. They are both quite dry and vinous, the Brut elegant, This Side Up glassy and sharp.

The Art of Défécation (Keeving)

The new Drouin cidery is located on the old farm, which is actually the site of the original cidery and distillery. In 1990, after steady growth, the family moved operations to an amazing farm in Coudray-Rabut, near Pont L’Évêque. It is made up of several half-timbered structures, and they ring a central square like petals on a daisy. One building is the old house, another the historic pressoir where the family currently does distillation, and other buildings are used for cask storage. Eventually these buildings were insufficient, so the Drouins moved the cider making back near the original location. It’s an odd sight. We drove up to it through an old orchard in the midst of which was a half-timbered shed with thatch roofing, and out in a clearing emerged a jumble of steel surmounted by a tall roof—a cidery with no walls.

Although it is a modern facility, it has been optimized to make cider using a method that is at least four hundred years old. It is the complicated but ingenious process of making a stable bottle of cider that contains residual sugars. This challenge has forever plagued cider-makers. So long as even a few yeast cells remain in a bottle, they will reproduce and consume whatever sugar is available. That dynamic either leads to explosive bottles or dry ciders free of sugar. Modern cideries use microfiltration or pasteurization to remove or kill the yeast. Pasteurization, the process of heating the cider, may damage the flavor and aroma, and filtration is not foolproof. (Recently an American cider-maker had to recall a batch that wasn’t filtered properly and led to exploding bottles.) The most elegant solution is keeving, which not only allows large amounts of sugar to remain, but suffers none of the violence done by pasteurization or filtering. The downside is that it’s time consuming and difficult to pull off.

Since the sugar and yeast will remain in the cider at bottling, the cider-maker’s goal is removing a third factor required to produce fermentation—nutrients. If he can effectively strip those out of the cider, the yeasts will go dormant, even with succulent molecules of fructose floating around tempting them. The process begins just after the apples have been ground but before they’re pressed. The pulp is left to sit for up to a day, though Guillaume Drouin has found he gets the best results in just two to three hours. Called “maceration,” this process allows the pectin to leach out of the cell walls. It also oxidizes the tannins, turning the juice dark; some cider-makers believe the process leaves the tannins “softer.” Drouin is one. “The maceration transforms the structure of the tannins. If you don’t macerate, you get more astringent tannins. If you macerate, you will get nearly the same structure, but it’s going to be a bit smoother, rounder.”

The Drouins use a press typical of wineries; a large enclosed cylinder with a membrane on the inside that slowly inflates, squeezing the juice from the pomace (skins, dry pulp, and seeds). “It’s made to respect the fruit as much as possible,” Drouin explained. He can set it to extract a precise amount of juice, and he prefers 65 percent. “It doesn’t turn a lot, and it inflates slowly. It’s made for a light extraction.” Once he has the juice, he checks the temperature to ensure it’s below 46°F [8°C]; if not, he runs it through a chiller to drop it to that level. Temperature is absolutely critical for défécation—above 46°F [8°C] and it will fail.

Over the next week, the juice goes through some fascinating chemistry. Enzymes take the pectin and slowly convert it to pectic acid, which forms—well, there’s no way to softball this—gelatinous blobs. Fermentation starts at the same time, but because it’s so cold, the yeasts are sluggish, producing only intermittent bubbles of CO₂. Those gentle bubbles rise, pushing slimy gobbets of pectic acid up to the top of the vat. Guillaume takes over the description, “The pectins conglomerate together and this makes a heavy, solid thing than goes to the top of the tank, which we call chapeau brun, ‘brown hat.’” The hat compacts as more and more of the pectic acid rises. Those rising globs also rob the juice of much of its nutrients, which cider-makers now realize is the key to défécation. It is therefore paramount that the cap not be disturbed, lest those nutrients fall back into the cider.

“When the hat is made, you have to rack the cider [move it from one tank to another]. This is very important.” Guillaume monitors the chapeau with state-of-the-art technology—a stick he uses to probe the mass and measure its density. “You have more or less twelve hours, maybe twenty-four, to do this racking properly. If you do it too early, the hat is not completed and we will still have a lot of pectin left in the cider, which is not good. But if you wait too long, the hat falls down in the tank. Too late; this is not for bottling cider anymore.” Fortunately for the Drouins, a collapsed hat is not a catastrophe. “The problem with the chapeau brun,” Guillaume explains cheerily, “is that it works 90 percent of the time; 10 percent it doesn’t work. Then you make Calvados.”

Once Guillaume feels the process is complete, he draws the clear juice out from underneath the chapeau brun (certain solids also precipitate out and collect at the bottom; he’s careful to leave those lees undisturbed as well). All that remains is slow fermentation, generally lasting three months or more. If the fermenting cider gets too warm, it will start to ferment too quickly, so he’ll run it through the chiller to keep it below 52°F [11°C]. Fermentation is a balancing act; Drouin wants the yeast to ferment the cider to a certain point, but no further. Over the course of those three months, he repeatedly filters and racks (transfers) the cider, stripping it of most of the yeast cells. This forces the yeast to repopulate, and that in turn causes them to scrub the cider of nutrients. Regularly filtering and racking the cider also gives it more complexity because each time the yeasts repopulate, they produce more flavor and aroma compounds. By the time he’s ready to bottle, the yeasts should have nearly exhausted the nutrients—just enough to turn the cider sparkling in the bottle, but not explosively so.

The Cider of Brittany

When you look at a map of France, you see two peninsulas reaching out like arms toward Great Britain. The right arm belongs to cider-making Normandy, the left to cider-making Brittany. But it was into the Armorican peninsula—Brittany—where a stream of immigrants from Wales and England made the left arm “little Britain.” The Celtic language of Breton is spoken there, a tongue related to Cornish—and in fact there is a region, Cornouaille, that means “Cornwall” in French. And of course, the two regions also have cider in common.

Normandy is far more well-known for its cider (more Norman ciders are available abroad), but Brittany produces 40 percent of France’s cider and has a lively collection of traditional producers. Like Normandy, the ciders of Brittany are largely made through keeving and retain the French quality of roundness and balance. Ciders from Brittany, though, are on the average stronger. A typical Norman cider rarely ranges above 5 percent ABV, but Breton ciders often do. That means they’re drier, but even more characteristic is the minerality that comes from granite soils.

The first Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC)—the certification for products made in certain areas of France—given to a French cider was named for Cornouaille in Finistère, and many of the features describe typical traditional practices: pure juice, natural fermentation, and natural bottle carbonation. In applying for the appellation, cider-makers demonstrated that their practices dated at least to the nineteenth century, with orcharding dating to the sixth century and cider making to the fourteenth. The official appellation also identifies seven classic apples of Finistère (though other varieties may also be used), including Kermerrien, Marie Ménard, Douce Moën, Douce Coêtligné, and Guillevic.

As in Normandy, cider is distilled in Brittany, but the resultant brandy is known as Lambig, not Calvados. According to its AOC, Lambig must be aged four years on oak, but like Calvados, is regularly aged for decades. Brittany produces Pommeau as well, though the AOC does not stipulate a ratio of juice-to-Lambig blend; it simply must be 16 to 18 percent when bottled.

Most of the traditional cider currently made in Normandy is keeved, but it wasn’t always that way. A century ago, the most highly prized cider was fermented dry, to 6 to 7 percent alcohol. Sometimes they were packaged still, sometimes carbonated—either mousseux (sparkling, but bottled before fermentation had finished) or bottle-conditioned in the méthode champenoise. One imagines those are the ciders Cyril Zangs would have prized.

Zangs originally thought he’d be a winemaker. He is from Normandy and his grandfather made ciders, but they were the keeved variety. French ciders have changed over the decades, and the stronger, drier products a hundred years ago mostly died out. The sweeter ciders didn’t appeal to Zangs, who much preferred wine and left Normandy to learn how to make it. But there’s something about Normandy that pulls cider-makers back (Guillaume Drouin fell back into cider’s orbit after a similar vinous dalliance). For Zangs, the epiphany came when he tried one of the ciders made by François David, a giant in Norman cider making. David, who was sometimes called Le Pape du Cidre (“the Pope of Cider”), also made the low-alcohol ciders typical of the region; they were so accomplished, though, that Zangs had the first inkling of what ciders could be.

David taught Zangs how to make cider, but Cyril has gone his own way, crafting ciders in the old-fashioned manner, dry and sparkling. When I met him at his house, one of the first things announced was “I’m not doing real typical ciders.” It’s true. Zangs makes just two types of ciders, and they have the quality of wine about them, even down to vintage dating. One is 6 percent alcohol by volume, one 7 percent. His comment struck a note in my mind that sounded, sweet and clear, throughout our visit. I tested it against everything he told me. When I shook hands with him after my tour, just as dusk was settling on the rainy village of Glos, I understood it differently. Zangs does not make ciders like other makers scattered around Normandy; but he does make ciders one would call purely French.

Zangs is a precise man. He speaks precisely, he has a precise cider-making process, and even the gesticulations of his hands are precise, like a conductor’s. On the day I visited, he was wearing a tweed driving cap and wool scarf and we chatted awhile before we drove over to his cidery. His one area of abandon seems to be the road—we rocketed through copses of trees and bounced around country lanes like race-car drivers, making the trip in half the time it would have taken me alone. He gave me a sly smile when I commented on it.

We started the tour outside the cidery, at the mobile press he uses. Zangs’s press isn’t an antique (it dates to the 1950s), but the technology is barely updated. Once, presses like this would have circulated among the smaller cideries, doing a day’s work before moving on. They have an ingenious design that allows the workers to stay in continuous motion. There are two racks, side by side. While one side is being pressed, the other can be changed out, emptied, and loaded with fresh pulp. The racks are on a swivel, so once one is done pressing, the press goes up, the racks exchange places, and the fresh rack begins pressing while the other one is emptied out and readied again.

Zangs is incredibly fastidious about the cleanliness of his apples. He waits until they’re fully ripe to harvest, and then carefully sorts and cleans them. In a given year, he’ll remove up to 10 percent of them for defects or rot. But then, just like the Drouins, he makes his cider of a blend containing no more than 10 percent tart apples. If apple blends are one of the keys to defining national character—and they are—this is one clue to his ciders’ provenance. Partly because of the way the swivel press works, he doesn’t macerate his pulp. Perhaps the bigger reason is because he once tried it and “saw no difference.”

Gravity Readings

How do you know how much alcohol you have in your cider? You do a gravity reading. This is a simple process of immersing an instrument in liquid in order to see how much dissolved sugars it contains. Water, nature’s sugar-free treat, measures 1.000 on the gravity scale. Apple juice typically has a value of around 1.055. As yeasts convert the sugars to alcohol, that gravity falls. In fact, alcohol has a lower gravity than water, so if yeasts are able to consume most the sugar, the finishing or “final gravity” of a cider can be less than one. (English cider-makers report final gravities as low as 0.097.)

He has no way to chill the cider, so the fruit that comes in early begins fermenting warmer. It’s one of the trade-offs with natural cider making, and one he’s learned to live with. “If you have a warm temperature, you can have a yeast that is very tough and will say to other ones, ‘hey shut up, I work, I work.’” Here he was talking about the dominant strains that come in the potpourri of microorganisms. When it’s warm, vigorous yeasts will outperform the weaker ones. “But when it’s cold, it’s difficult for her, so a lot of different yeasts work—everybody can say something.”

Even though he doesn’t keeve his ciders, his process is much like others in France. He racks it several times. The purpose here is different from keeved ciders, though. He’s not trying to starve the yeasts of nutrients; he’s slowing down fermentation. Because the cider doesn’t immediately get scrubbed the way keeved cider does, nutrients continue to sustain yeasts through several rackings. Typically, Zangs racks his cider at gravities of 1.035, 1.025, 1.016, and then just before bottling. Each time he racks, it removes carbon dioxide, allowing particulates to fall, clarifying the cider. And, just to illustrate the differences between England and France, when Zangs lets his cider go all the way to “dry,” this means about 1.007. Across the English Channel, dry is 1.005 or lower, and 1.007 counts as “medium.”

Cider Under Cork

Eating in Normandy is both a pleasure and a snap. Most of the restaurants I visited offered three-course prix-fixe menus that highlighted local cuisine. One feature that distinguishes Norman dining is the option of cider instead of wine with your meal. (As one gauge to the relative saturation of cider, even in Normandy, a glance at the wine and cider lists is revealing. No restaurant I visited offered a choice of more than six ciders; none offered fewer than a dozen wines. Cider is more readily available in Normandy than Herefordshire, but one shouldn’t leap to the impression that it has displaced le vin.)

If you order a bottle of cider, the waiter will arrive to serve it to you, just as he would a bottle of wine. With an economy of motion typical of experts, he will uncage a mushroom-shaped cork, remove it with a pop, and fill your glass—wine or cider, it’s the same one—with a dancing, shimmering liquid. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose wine. In my favorite meal at a little café in the coastal town of Honfleur, a bottle of Le Père Jules was the perfect match for a bowl of fish stew.

One of the hallmarks of French cider is bottle fermentation. At the grossest level, this means effervescence. That pop of the cork and the vigorous bead are what people remember about French ciders. But there’s more to it than simple carbonation. When ciders ferment naturally, they continue to change chemically. The yeast continues to produce compounds and add complexity. According to the French approach, a cider isn’t finished when it’s ready to bottle—it goes into the bottle to finish. “You always have to imagine that it will continue to change,” Guillaume Drouin explains. “Actually it shouldn’t be perfect at that moment [bottling]; it should be perfect after the fermentation in the bottle, which completely transforms the structure again. It really affects the taste.”

The process takes a long time—a bare minimum of two months. During that time, the carbon dioxide will become absorbed into the body of the cider, adding another classic French characteristic. When it’s ready, that carbonation will make the cider silky, giving it a luxurious quality that regular carbonation, which is rocky and rough, can’t emulate. When the French make sparkling wines, they even call this mousse. Cider-makers typically rest their bottles upright as they condition. If for some reason the balance of sugars, nutrients, and yeast isn’t just right and the bottles overcarbonate, the gas can escape out around the cork. (Lying sideways, the rising gas couldn’t escape and the bottles would explode.)

Disgorgement

Inside Cyril Zangs’s cidery, the old Norman building has been divided into two rooms. If you don’t look too closely at the stucco- and-timber walls, one of the rooms looks like any other cidery—lots of large steel and fiberglass tanks filled with bubbling potions. The other room is more unusual. Arrayed along one wall are wooden racks (pupitres in French), each studded with scores of bottles standing arse-end up. Imagine sandwich boards perforated with holes the size of a champagne bottle’s neck. If my count was accurate, each side of the sandwich board contains 216 bottles—around 3,000 in all.

En Français

Many of the techniques used in cider making come from the wine world—and vintners are often touchy about reappropriation. Winemakers from the Champagne region of France invented the technique of disgorgement known as the méthode champenoise—a term they claim as their own. The same technique used elsewhere (or, heaven forbid, used to make cider) is definitionally not the méthode champenoise. As a consequence, you may hear the term méthode traditionnelle. Making cider in the typical French manner, with natural fermentation and carbonation—but without disgorgement—is sometimes called the méthode ancestrale. Subtle differences, but they mean a great deal in France.

What are they doing there?

Let’s back up a step. One of the by-products of natural fermentation is a light dusting of yeast cells that settle to the bottom of a bottle of cider. After three months, the cider becomes clear and sparkling, but the moment the cork comes off the bottle, all that trapped gas will agitate the yeast, slightly clouding the cider. This cloudiness disturbed the French mind. Going to all the trouble of naturally fermenting, carbonating, and clarifying and then everything gets cloudy? To avoid that minor imperfection, winemakers in the Champagne region came up with an incredibly laborious process known as the méthode champenoise (the Champagne method). Few cider-makers go through the bother, but Cyril Zangs is one of them. And what a bother!

Zangs goes through the normal procedure for bottle fermentation, though he caps rather than corks his bottles. (This is another reason he lets the cider go drier than most of his colleagues do—there’s no risk of explosion in a capped bottle.) Then he places them on the racks at a forty-five-degree angle. For the next three weeks, he will turn each bottle “nearly a quarter” turn every day. This process is known as “riddling” (or remuage in French) and the goal is to slowly work the lees down the bottle and into the neck. It’s a tricky business because the particles have different density. “The heavy yeast goes down quick,” Zangs explains, “but the light one always stays back. So, if you do it too quick—poof—the big one goes and you will never get the light one back. The big one [pushes] the small one at the same time.”

This riddling process is labor-intensive and big companies have automated it. I saw one of these machines in action at Le Face Cachée de la Pomme in Quebec. The bottles are placed in a large crate and trussed up on a mechanical device that slowly moves the entire crate, rather than each bottle. It takes Zangs a half hour to rotate each of his three thousand bottles, but the machine does it in a matter of seconds. As the days go on, Zangs also adjusts the angle of each bottle so that as the yeast nears the neck, the pitch gets steeper.

If Zangs has done his riddling properly, in three weeks’ time there will be a small puck of yeast resting on the upside-down bottle cap. Next comes disgorgement (dégorgement), when the puck is removed. Normally he sets aside two long, sticky days to work through the whole batch, but on the day I visited, he demonstrated with a single bottle. The contents are under explosive pressure, so the first thing he does is don a rubber jacket—after a couple hours, it will be running with rivulets of cider. The process is pretty much what it sounds like—a pop of the cap and the puck is “disgorged” and sent skyward, along with a spray of mist. There is a trick, however. In order to do it properly, the disgorger holds the bottle neck down while fitting a church key onto the cap. Then he lifts it slowly, allowing the pocket of gas to ascend to the bottle’s neck. He must open the bottle at the same moment the gas arrives or it will disturb the yeast and send it in a cloud back into the bottle. If that happens, he has to riddle the bottle all over again.

It’s odd that opening the bottle doesn’t damage the level and balance of carbonation, but it doesn’t. This is one of those benefits to natural carbonation. Zangs disgorges when it’s still cold, so the carbon dioxide is already pretty lazy—but the real reason has to do with how well integrated it has become into the cider. After disgorgement, he has to re-cap each bottle, and because he’s lost some of the cider during disgorgement, he has to use some of the disgorged bottles to top off the others.

At the end of it all, Zangs will have spent an extra month preparing his cider, hours and hours riddling and disgorging, and he will even end up with fewer bottles than he started with—all in the service of avoiding a little cloudiness. No, his ciders may not be typical for the region, but my, they are still très française.

Calvados and Pommeau

Calvados is not well-known in the United States. To Americans, brandy means “grape” and Cognac and possibly Armagnac spring to mind. When I’ve described Calvados to Americans, they seem to anticipate something unserious and medieval—“apple brandy” sounds like something Bilbo Baggins would drink. In fact, Calvados is one of the world’s most complex liquors. I am by no means a brandy expert, and so when I cast around for an analogue, my mind fixes on whisky. There’s an enormous range between Lowland malts, light and refreshing as spring water, and smoky, aggressive Islay malts. In this way, too, I have found a range in Calvados that takes it from a sweeter, fruit-forward spirit to one that, like Islay whisky, is dry, complex, and assertive. Like whisky, Calvados is a product of the alchemy wrought by terroir, wood, and age.

Christian Drouin’s Calvados is made back at the picturesque farmhouse in Coudray-Rabut. The family has dubbed it Coeur de Lion (“lion heart”), a fitting name for such a grand place. The historic pressoir is where the cider is distilled, and the Drouins have turned it into a working museum that includes the old apple press the family once used. The old mobile still, made in 1946, stands out in front like an ornament, but it is actually still in use. By law, Pays d’Auge Calvados must be distilled twice, like Cognac, and in fact the main still, housed inside the pressoir, was originally built to produce Cognac.

Calvados begins with cider, but not the same cider that goes into bottles, with tons of residual sugar. For distillation, it is fermented completely dry. As the cider distills, the first portion to emerge is known as the “head,” and it is aromatic and aggressive. That portion is put aside. The heart comes next—it’s the portion that will go on to be distilled a second time. Prior to redistillation, it’s known as the petite eau. The tail comes last, and it contains vegetal, fatty flavors. The head and tail will go back in with cider and be distilled in a subsequent batch and become petite eau. After the first distillation, the heart will only be around 30 percent alcohol by volume. The process repeats with the heart, but the resultant spirit will now be 70 percent alcohol.

At this point, the young brandy (eau de vie de pomme) is ready for aging, where it will transform from a clear, rough liquor to a rich, amber one. A lot of chemistry happens in the casks, and it continues the whole time the Calvados ages, whether that’s the minimum three years or three decades.

Aging takes a lot of space. As we moved around from building to building, we found barrels stacked floor to ceiling, tucked into nooks, and crowding passageways. To get a twenty-year-old stock—far from ancient among Calvados-makers—Drouin needs to stash several barrels for each year. After two decades, he will have stowed dozens of casks and have yet to put a drop in a bottle. (In fact, this is exactly what the founder, Christian Drouin, did.)

Clearly, the age is a critical element for Calvados. Guillaume explained the process. “There are three things that happen together. The first thing is the contact with the wood. The wood gives color at first, but it will mainly give tannins—that’s part of the structure of the Calvados—and new flavors. The second thing is oxidation. The Calvados is always in contact with the air, and this completely transforms the flavors.” Oak is porous; not enough to let the liquid out, but enough to let oxygen in. “The young spirit smells like fresh apple. With time in the cask, the flavors will move to baked apples, ripe apples, apple marmalade, and, at the end, dry fruits. That’s due to the oxidation.” When people talk about the age of a liquor, they always mean the amount of time it was aged on wood, not once it was bottled. Because of the oxidation, the cask creates a dynamic environment. Each barrel will contribute slightly different qualities to the liquor. This is why, when distillers release vintages of Calvados, they all have their own character. Once any spirit is put into a bottle, it quits changing and, as a result, quits aging.

Guillaume continued, “And the last thing is evaporation; 3.8 percent is our annual loss. Evaporation is very important because of what it brings—first of all, it will concentrate the Calvados, so an old Calvados will stay in your mouth very long, it will get very rich, and at the same time what evaporates first is the aggressivity. Everything that is hard, aggressive evaporates at first.” In the cask, the evaporation reverses the process of the still; it is the liquor that departs, and water stays behind. Because the Calvados begins life as a 70 percent spirit, this actually works to the distiller’s benefit. In order to bottle young Calvados, distillers must slowly add water in to bring it back down to the standard 40 percent, but old Calvados descends on its own.

How to Taste Calvados

When Guillaume Drouin poured out the first sample of his Calvados, a 1991, I seized the glass and started swirling it vigorously to release the aromas. He was polite enough to address this faux pas obliquely, by ignoring it and telling me a story about haughty Parisian sommeliers. “If you give Calvados to an experienced sommelier, usually what he does is very offensive for us. He does this.” Guillaume then put his own glass flat on the table and swirled it hard, like I had a few minutes earlier. “That’s good for wine,” he said, “but with Calvados, what you get if you do that is the perception of alcohol.” Instead, you want to be very gentle with Calvados. Hold the glass at an angle and slowly turn it, coating the inside. “Wait a little bit until all the aggressive flavors go out. When you see that he is halfway [down the inside of the glass], you bring that slowly to your mouth to get all the complexity at once. That’s the trick.”

As we walked from room to room, I could see all the variables at play. In one, the casks were all standard wine barrel-size, but in another, each was a slightly different shape. (An old Calvados-maker’s trick to fool the tax man.) We came into a room and Guillaume stopped and sampled the air. “This is a good room,” he said. “The temperature is always the same, there’s good humidity in here. This room makes very mellow Calvados.” This reminded me of one of my favorite whiskies, Scapa, from the Orkney Islands. It is aged in warehouses on the sea, and after sixteen years it actually imparts a subtle briny scent. I wanted to ask if this was an element of a Calvados’s terroir, but Guillaume had already gone ahead.

If Calvados turns out to be one of the most sophisticated spirits, the odd beverage known as Pommeau does warrant a reputation as rustic and old-timey. Bilbo Baggins may well have had a bottle in his cupboard. The historical record fails to include Pommeau’s invention, but it seems a pretty safe bet that farmers have been making it for a long time. Pouring enough Calvados into unfermented juice to raise it to 15 percent will kill off the yeast and bacteria, sterilizing the juice and making it fit for storage—science that cider-making farmers would have understood for centuries.

Pommeau’s range may not be quite as broad as Calvados’s, but individual products have their own character. Some are heavy and sweet as treacle, while others are more nuanced, with a fruitiness backed up by structure. They have the quality of dessert wine and, like them, have a small target where the richness and complexity come together. Drouin’s Pommeau is built to mitigate sweetness and display the tannins of the fruit and character of the Calvados. As Guillaume explained, “The way I understand Pommeau is that it shouldn’t be too sweet. I don’t want it to be too heavy.”

Drouin does this by making a special juice of apples that have lots of bitterness and not so much sugar. Pressed fresh, the juice still tastes sweet, but it has other flavors that will harmonize with the Calvados. Putting the blend on wood helps draw out complexity. By law, once the juice and Calvados are blended—with Calvados composing 25 to 33 percent of the mixture—they must age in a barrel at least fourteen months. Christian Drouin Pommeau spends three years in the barrel and is made with a blend of Calvados vintages from four to ten years old. “We age it longer to give more time to the Pommeau to get rounder, smoother, and well-integrated,” said Guillaume. “It’s an easy taste.” As we drank it, he gave some tasting notes. “There’s a bit of bitterness, oxidation. Cinnamon, dry fruit.” I would add a woody stiffness and a hint of forest floor.

Spending an afternoon with Cyril Zangs is a curious experience—but it seemed to capture something of the essence of the French part of French cider making. Zangs is the most precise cider-maker I ever encountered. He has exacting standards about everything from the condition and cleanliness of his fruit to the painstaking process of preparing his bottles for disgorgement. After touring his cidery, we had returned to his home and were finishing up our meeting at his rustic dining room table with a sampling of his ciders. I asked how he knew he had made a good cider. “It’s very simple. When you drink it, it has to make you [feel] good.” He regarded the cider. “It is just evident.”

I wouldn’t have known how to interpret that had it been the first thing he told me, but after listening to him talk about cider, I think I understood what he meant. The French go through the most steps between harvest and bottling to arrive at their cider, but the idea is to achieve a kind of perfect simplicity. If he does his part right, the cider should express itself in its own natural way. “Everything is in the fruit,” he told me. Some years he has more bitter fruit, some years more sweet. He doesn’t make his cider to fit a profile; his techniques allow the cider to reveal itself. “I just take my varieties and I make my ciders the best I can with what I get.”

Guillaume Drouin, who makes entirely different kinds of ciders, told me almost the same thing. “My philosophy is to do as little as possible with the cider. I don’t like this idea of cooking, you know?” (By “cooking,” he was referring to the vintner’s approach of constructing a wine.) “The less I can do, the happier I am.” It’s like a Zen koan. The essence of French cider could be summarized as “from complexity, simplicity.”