Emmanuel Camut Pommeau Ambrosia

Apple must boiled down overnight on the stove until it's lost more than half its volume, then blended with four-year-old Calvados — that's Ambrosia, and it tastes nothing like the usual Normandy aperitif. Emmanuel Camut is one of three seventh-generation brothers running the family's Calvados house in the Pays d'Auge, and the most restless of them; this is his own experiment, bottled under his own name and reaching the US for the first time. The apples come from the family's hautes-tiges orchards — tall, widely spaced trees grazed and fertilized by Limousin cows — planted to about twenty-five historical Normandy varieties chosen for the richness they give. The family has never labelled these aperitifs Pommeau de Normandie, since their soil has never carried enough stone to qualify, so it goes out as an Aperitif Normand instead: a technicality that costs it a famous name and nothing else. Darker and deeper than a standard Pommeau, it sits closer to a dessert wine than an aperitif, which is exactly what makes it interesting.