Emmanual Camut - Ambrosia Pommeau (750 mL)
Emmanual Camut - Ambrosia Pommeau (750 mL)
Ambrosia Pommeau is an apéritif made in the style of Pommeau de Normandie by Emmanual Camut in Normandy, France. Made from 100% apples grown in the Pays d’Auge appellation. Unique in his process, Ammanual Camut boils the apple must (unfermented apple juice) overnight to concentrate sugar, sometimes reducing it by more than half. This must is then combined with 4-year-old Calvados (French apple brandy) and aged in barrels until bottling.
Darker than a regular Pommeau, notes of preserved apple, vanilla and aged balsamic vinegar enticingly introduce a palate of baking spice and custard pastry with pleasant, fresh apple cider tannin on the finish. This apéritif leans towards a dessert wine with an explosion of tarte Tatin flavors. Exceptional.
About Emmanual Camut: The Camut family has been making calvados at the Domaine de Semainville, in the gateway to the Pays d’Auge, for seven generations. Lauded as one of the finest heritage spirit producers, many admirers of French brandy are familiar with the Camut name. Of the three brothers that currently run Calvados Adrien Camut, Emmanuel may be considered the most outspoken. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that he has begun to cultivate his own path within the family’s distilling story.
About 15 years ago, Emmanuel took an interest—which rapidly became an obsession—in balsamic vinegar. During the long, cold winter nights in Normandy, Emmanuel would gently reduce apple must on the wood stove in his 19th-century house until it reached a rich sugar concentration. This reduction was placed into wood barrels of various origins, where it slowly fermented and aged. With each passing year, as more and more quantity evaporated, the vinegar became sweeter, more viscous, and extremely concentrated. After 12 years, Emmanuel finally began to sell this unctuous nectar while topping up the largest casks with additional reduced must, establishing a solera style of aging within this balsamic cave. This is perhaps the best vinegar France has ever produced, used in the kitchens of several Michelin three-star restaurants in Paris.
While continuing work at the calvados domaine, Emmanuel’s imagination then took him in another direction, leading him to cover another part of his property with additional cellars for barrel storage. From a small beer producer, also located in Normandy, he bought beer that he distilled in the Camut stills and aged in a wide range of barrels, including some that had previously held calvados or balsamic vinegar. After having visited Martinique, he also developed an interest in rum, and decided to pass molasses shipped from France’s Reunion Islands through the Camut stills. Builiding additional storage space became a necessity; the grassy areas of his property were shrinking, but the barrels continued to multiply.
While Emmanuel’s goal is to age his spirits at great length, a few of the smaller barrels have developed amazingly well in less than a decade. These fine spirits offer different aromas, textures, and flavors than others on the market for obvious reasons: the unique marriage between ingredient provenance and that of their distillation, an inherited talent for deft production on Camut’s firewood-heated stills, and Emmanuel’s passion and curiosity for new projects and willingness to push the accepted boundaries of the family’s producing limits (not unlike the spirit attributed to his grandfather, Adrien).
Pommeau de Normandie is a name denoting a regulated French category of spirit. Though the Camut family is known for its exceptional Pays d’Auge distillates, their property has never had enough stone in the soil to qualify for Pommeau de Normandie status. Instead, Camut has always released its low-ABV apéritif as an ‘Apéritif Normand’. Now, Emmanual Camut, looking to experiment, has created his own interpretation of the family’s Apéritif Normand, bottled under his own name.
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- Features:
- ABV: 17.0%
- Format: 750 mL Bottle
- Shipping available across U.S.
- In stock, ready to ship
- Inventory on the way
