Fruit Forward

The northern French region of Calvados, known for its apple brandy, is ripe for the picking.

- Adam Erace

FORTIFIEZ-MOI avec des pommes; car je suis malade d'amour. This line from the Song of Songs appears on a plaque in the orchard of Calvados Christian Drouin. "Refresh me with apples," goes the translation, "for I am sick with love." Like Champagne and Cognac, Calvados is both a drink-in this case, apple brandy-and a place. The département, one of the five that make up Normandy, covers 2,100 square miles, with a majestic Atlantic coastline unspooling from the Seine estuary to the World War II battlefield of Omaha Beach.

Lush cow pasture (cheese is another of the area's culinary calling cards) and tidy orchards cover the interior.

Since the 1960s, the Drouin family has been distilling the fruits of the land in the heart of the Pays d'Auge, the most exacting of the three appellations in which Calvados can be produced. But when Guillaume Drouin joined the family business in 2004, it was the drink's reputation that needed refreshing.

The entrance to Les Franciscaines, an arts center in Deauville

"It had a dusty image," he told me. "It was the bottle of your grandfather."

Drouin's own grandfather, Christian, started as a hobby distiller. By the 1980s, when Drouin's father, Christian Jr., began bottling, "Calvados was still very regional," he said.