Calvados Cocktails

For the past twenty years, Calvados has been stuck in an after-dinner drink category known as digestif, an alcohol consumed following a meal whose alcoholic power helps aid the digestion of the food one has consumed. Yet in a world that has strict laws with regards to drinking and driving and in which people drink more wine at the table, the digestif has become the drink relatively easy to avoid.

"I have to drive."

"I have to get up early for work."

"It's late."

Excuses commonly heard. Not to mention that a glass of well-aged calvados at a restaurant can be expensive. So with people drinking the digestif more infrequently, more calvados stays on the shelf and less is purchased by the restaurant. Let's face it: if a restaurant orders a bottle of calvados, fifteen or so customers must order a glass before the bottle is finished. With most bars at restaurants having often a hundred different spirits for customers to choose from and with after dinner consumption down anyway, it might take a year (if not more) before any particular bottle is terminated.

What continues to infuriate the French is the fact that whisky continues to outsell calvados, armagnac, and cognac in their own country by a significant amount. A couple of factors are responsible for this. The first is the exoticism of consuming something from another country (even if it is your heated cross-channel rival) — the grass is greener type-of-thing. But the largest reason that whisky outsells French brandy is because it can easily be consumed before or after a meal. It can be served in a cocktail or neat, straight up or on the rocks, with water or without, in a shot glass or snifter. It can be a chic pre-dinner drink ("Two fingers of Chivas on the rocks, please.") or a classy post dinner tipple: ("Can you bring a round of Caol Ila to the table?") One doesn't commonly hear, "Calvados on the rocks... in fact, make it a double!" from the pre-theatre crowd bellying up to the bar.

But there's a new kid in town that is starting to cut into the sales of whisky. Alcool blanc — clear alcohols like vodka, gin, and rum — have captured the youth market and are becoming more popular in cafés in France and restaurants around the world. Why have these alcohols become popular? They are relatively inexpensive for starters. Vodka can be make from grain or potatoes and does not see the expense of oak aging. The cost of a bottle that houses it is often worth several times more than the product itself. Money aside, vodka and rum have become popular because they largely take on the character of the fruit juice they are commonly mixed with, which are cocktails that are generally sweet and fun to drink.

So in trying to give calvados a before/after dual purpose (like whisky) and also to have cocktail appeal, creative barmen have been able to invent delicious drinks using young calvados or clear calvados as the principle ingredient. So instead of having to wait until the end of a meal when the refusal of a digestif becomes easy, before-dinner drinks now introduce consumers to the Norman nectar that would never have been consumed before.