Making eau de vie at Chateaux Raynaudes

I can clearly remember the evening eight years ago when we first set eyes on the Manoir de Raynaudes. It was dusk and it was drizzling. We drove around a lake and up a rough avenue towards a once-elegant house with a pointy slate roof. In front of it lay a few neglected rows of spindly looking trees. It was December and the branches were bare, but something told me this had once been a cherry orchard.

Two months later the house was ours, and one of the first things I did was to knock on the door of the local farmer and beg for some manure. That winter, and every winter since, I have found a huge pile waiting for me at the edge of the orchard, which I have lovingly distributed round the base of the trees. Thus nourished, the trees have grown back lush and thick.

Anyone who has grown tree fruits knows the trees have a mind of their own. However carefully you prune them, they seem to have one year on, a year or two off. During our tenure here, our trees have fruited copiously in 2004, then again in 2006. That year the trees were so dripping with cherries that I asked the farmer what to do with them. Go see Cazottes, he said – a family distillery in Villeneuve-sur-Vère. a few villages away. And so we made our first cherry eau de vie.

Making eau de vie – specially from cherries - is an exhausting process, and it was with equal delight and horror that I saw signs in early spring that this year it was once again going to be raining cherries. The process is this. First of all, spread sheets on the grass below the cherry tree. Set up a ladder and snip or tug off as many cherries as you can reach, letting them drop onto the sheets. Climb down, reposition ladder and repeat. The best cherries always seem to be just out of reach, so you can use telescopic shears. Slow work - it takes a couple of hours to pick a whole tree, then round up all the cherries. Fortunately our trees fruit in sequence, so the work is staggered over a month.

Once you have a bucket of cherries, they need to be crushed into a large lidded black barrel kept for the purpose. Even this is not as easy as it sounds, because every cherry needs to have its tail pulled off first. (It seems the tails make the eau de vie bitter, though thankfully you don’t have to remove the stones). We have very obliging guests at the Manoir and they do their best to help. In 2006, the Welch family from the Lake District happened to be staying, and together they dewhiskered and squished virtually the whole crop. This year’s champions were Nick and Lisa. It is messy, slow work and if the sun is out, best done in a bikini.

The barrel takes a momentous 100 kilos of cherries. When full to the brim, you wait a few days for the fizzing to stop and clap on the lid. In September, we somehow hoik the barrel into the boot of the car and head for the distillery.

It is no myth that the French love paperwork. When I hand over the barrel I have to present an attestation from our mayor to confirm that we have cherry trees, the fruits of which we wish to have distilled. Last week I returned to pick up the eau de vie, which involved filling out three forms and making out cheques to both the distiller and the French government (for tax). And oh yes, Cazottes gave me a certificate bearing my car registration number, in case I was stopped on the way home for bootlegging.

Is it all worth it? What do you think? 18 litres of our very own, pure, shimmering 40% eau de vie de cerises, made from thousands of cherries ripened in the clean, bright Tarn sunshine and massaged by our (and our guests’) hands. Sipped icy cold after dinner, it is the month of May in a glass.

Before you ask, we cannot sell you a bottle because we don’t have the right sort of licence. Even more sadly, we will not be making cherry eau de vie again, because we have just signed a compromis de vente, meaning the Manoir de Raynaudes has been sold to new owners. Then again, if you happen to know of a property for sale with an orchard of those luscious little mirabelle plums…