Our Taste of Normandy Continues with Calvados! June 23, 2015
After our freshly prepared lunch and stroll around town, we met up with our group again and moved on to our last stop of the day. We would be visiting a Calvados distillery. This region of France is the only region where no wine is grown, it's actually too wet for the grapes to grow to produce good wine. So, when good wine can't be made, the next best thing is to make Calvados! Calvados is made from apples and is a cider type brandy. It ranges from a lighter cider to a Pommeau drink to a much stronger reserve that is aged longer. There are approximately 200 Calvados producers in the Normandy region who bottle and sell their Calvados, and they all have to follow the Appellations for Calvedos. We visited the Pierre Huet distillery. Our guide started by showing us the process from beginning to end and explaining how the Calvados products are made, starting from the apples, or sometimes pears. This is the machine that presses the fruit And th