Eau de Vie

This is fruit distilled and nothing else. No sugar, no ageing in most cases, and no colour: what goes into the still is fermented whole fruit, and what comes out is clear spirit that smells like the fruit and tastes dry.

The page is dominated by Alsace and the Vosges, which is where the French tradition is concentrated. Distillerie Mette has the widest range here, running from pear, peach, blackberry, mandarin, lime, pineapple and greengage through to sweet woodruff and elderberry. Distillery Bertrand covers kirsch, mirabelle, quetsch, wild raspberry, sloe, elderflower, holly berry and rosehip, and also distils a spirit from beer. Wolfberger bottles Poire William, kirsch, rosehip and a gentian. Bollenberg works with mullein flower and meadowsweet.

Outside Alsace, Distillerie La Salamandre in the south west has pear, mirabelle, kiwi, walnut and cask aged plum and apricot, Chateau Arton makes a pear, and L'Atelier du Bouilleur distils verbena. Rochelt in Austria bottles single vintage pear and wild plum at fifty per cent.

A few bottles are aged rather than clear: the Salamandre vieille prune and vieil abricot spend eight and ten years in wood, and Mette's Fine d'Alsace is a grape brandy rather than a fruit spirit.

Gentiane is worth separating out. It is distilled from gentian root rather than fruit, it is bitter rather than sweet, and it is a different drink from everything else on this page.

Unaged fruit spirit sits at one end of a family that runs all the way to forty year old brandy, and our brandy guide covers the whole spread.

History

Distilling fruit is a farm technique before it is an industry. Orchards and hedgerows produce more than a household can eat and far more than it can keep, and a still turns a crop that rots in a fortnight into something that lasts indefinitely. Alsace, the Vosges, the Black Forest and the Alpine valleys all developed the habit, and it crossed the modern French and German border long before that border existed.

France formalised it through the bouilleur de cru, the right of a grower to distil their own fruit, either at home or through a travelling still that moved between villages. That right was restricted in the twentieth century and is now largely historical, but it shaped the culture: for generations the spirit in the cupboard was made from the family's own trees.

Commercial houses grew out of that world rather than replacing it. The Alsatian distilleries on this page work the same fruit their neighbours grew, at a scale where a single variety is worth distilling on its own.

Yield is why these bottles cost what they do. It takes a large quantity of fruit to produce a small quantity of spirit, and the difficult fruits are the ones with the least sugar and the most aroma. Raspberry and elderflower are the extreme cases.

Ageing is the exception rather than the rule here, and where it happens it is usually in glass or neutral vessels, so the spirit keeps its clarity and its fruit.

How to drink it

Cold but not frozen, and in a small glass. The common advice to keep the bottle in the freezer is worth resisting: very low temperatures shut down the aroma, and aroma is the entire point of a spirit distilled from raspberries.

About ten to twelve degrees is the useful range, which means half an hour in the fridge rather than a night in the freezer. Chill the glass instead if you want it colder in the hand.

Use a small tulip. Pour a short measure, no more than about 30ml, and give it a moment. These are dry spirits at forty to fifty per cent with no sugar at all, so the first impression is alcohol and the fruit arrives a second later.

Traditionally they close a meal rather than open one, and they earn that place: a mirabelle or a quetsch after a long lunch does something a liqueur cannot.

At the table, match the fruit. Kirsch with chocolate or cherry desserts, pear with cheese, raspberry with anything involving cream. Kirsch and framboise are also classic pastry ingredients and a small measure in a fruit salad is a very old idea.

Gentiane is the one to treat differently. It is bitter, and it works before a meal with ice and a slice of lemon, or as the backbone of a cocktail.

Keep opened bottles upright, in the dark. They are stable for years.