The first "Pomme Prisonniere" was marketed by CALVADOS CHRISTIAN DROUIN in 1981. Since that time, "Pomme Prisonnière" has been so successful that the trade mark "Pomme Prisonnière" is now often mistaken for a generic name.
The story of "Pomme Prisonnière" is worth telling
Traditionally, farms in Normandy used to possess a carafe containing a pear preserved in Calvados. It was a matter of pride for the master of the house who had managed to grow the pear in the flask, and it never failed to arouse the curiosity of visitors. The fruit could be preserved indefinitely provided that it was always covered with Calvados. This explains why it is still possible in some farms to find flasks of Calvados that are more than a hundred years old ! By chance, just a few miles from the distillery, we came across a fruit grower, Didier Alleaume, whose family had kept the tradition alive through four generations, imprisoning pears in carafes for the pleasure of a few privileged friends. Together we decided to give new life to this old Normandy tradition by uniting the arts of the grower and the distiller in order to produce the "Imprisoned Pear". Almost at once we were attracted by the idea of associating apples with Calvados. However, if growing a large pear in a flask is already a difficult exercise that requires considerable experience, encouraging an apple to develop and grow in a carafe is almost impossible.
Apple trees flower abundantly; thousands of flowers give birth to thousands of fruits, but only 5% of the fruit embryos become apples. The others just fall from the tree. If one waits for the aborted fruits to fall before placing the carafes over the young apples there is a risk that the neck will be too narrow. To measure the remaining difficulty, one simply has to compare the length of the neck of the flask with that of the apple stem. We nevertheless made the attempt, and were the first to offer an "Imprisoned Apple" in Calvados. Despite a failure rate that is high, we can offer a limited number of "Imprisoned Apples" for sale.
