Gabriel Boudier

The Fontobonne distillery was founded in 1874 in Dijon, on Boulevard Strasbourg in the heart of Burgundy. In 1909, Gabriel Boudier took over the operation and renamed it after himself, building the business until his death in 1918. His widow ran the Maison through the interwar years, then sold it in 1936 to the Battault family, who kept the Boudier name on the basis that the brand had already become a category reference. The Piffaut family acquired the house in 2022, making them the third family-ownership generation since the original 1874 founding.

The Dijon site has remained the production base across all three families. Boudier's defining product is the Crème de Cassis de Dijon, made from Noir de Bourgogne blackcurrants — the dense, late-ripening Burgundian variety that gives Dijon cassis its colour and weight. The blackcurrants are macerated whole in neutral spirit, then pressed, blended and sweetened to the 20% ABV signature. The same maceration discipline runs through the wider liqueur range — apricot, raspberry, strawberry, lychee, mango, elderflower, chestnut, mure — and through the saffron gin, where threaded saffron yields the spirit's golden-yellow colour after maceration in a juniper-led botanical base.

The current catalogue runs broader than the classic crèmes. Alongside the workhorse fruit liqueurs at 20% (raspberry, blackcurrant, strawberry, mango, lychee, mure, melon, myrtille, citron-gingembre) and the saffron gin, Boudier produces a list of unusual flavour-led bottles: a Dijon mustard liqueur, a nori-seaweed liqueur, a coffee-rum-peanut liqueur, a chipotle liqueur, an elderflower at 18%, and the Fontbonne plant-bitter at 45%. The cocktail-base range carries through to chocolate (cacao), camomile, vodka-vanilla and more recent launches that lean toward bartender experimentation rather than classical French digestif.