Eric Bordelet

Eric Bordelet approaches cider with the seriousness a good winemaker brings to wine. He was a sommelier at the three-star Paris restaurant Arpège, where he came to know the best growers in France, and in 1992 he went home to take over the family's small orchards at Charchigné, in the heart of Normandy's premium cider country. The family has farmed there since the 1800s.

Since then he has set about rescuing the old heirloom pear and apple varieties that give tiny yields and extraordinary flavour, and has planted many of them across his 23 hectares: thirty apple varieties, twenty of pear and eight of corme. The estate fruit is certified organic. The orchards sit on the Armorican massif on upper Brioverian schist, with the Argelette cuvée named for a soft red ferruginous schist nearly three billion years old, and the Granit cuvée taking its name from the much younger granite; the Poire Granit comes from very old trees scattered across the region.

Harvest runs by hand from September into December. The fruit is coarsely crushed and gently pressed, the juice settled and racked, then fermented by the ancestral method on the fruit's own sugars alone and bottled while it still holds its natural balance of sugar and acidity. The gentle sparkle is deliberate: it is there to carry the character of each fruit. Sulphur additions run between 50 and 80 milligrams depending on cuvée and vintage. He has also rebuilt the Château de Hauteville, which burnt down on the property nearly a century ago, not to live in but for its cellars.