Éric Bordelet

Fruit picked when the tree lets go

Fruit falls before Eric Bordelet, winemaker at Éric Bordelet in Charchigne, brings it into the cellar at Château de Hauteville. Apples can wait in plastic cassettes for 15–30 days; pears cannot. He processes them immediately, keeping the hand of the orchard close to the first decision of the cellar.

Bordelet came to this station by way of the dining room. He trained at École hôtelière de Granville, then worked as sommelier at Arpege Alain Passard in Paris from 1980 to 1992. In 1992 he returned to the family estate in Mayenne, near southern Normandy, and began treating cider and poiré with the discipline he had learned around wine: ripeness, assemblage, structure, the possibility of age. The house has been in the Bordelet lineage since the 1800s, but his work here changed its grammar.

His vocabulary follows the same conviction. He has described the work through the terms sydriculteur, pommologue and poirologue, words that place farming, fruit knowledge and cellar practice in the same hand. The orchards give him more than 20 apple varieties and 15 pear varieties. Some trees are 200–300 years old. Others are 40–100 years old, with newer espaliered plantings at 25 years. The range matters because Bordelet’s cider is not built from a single fruit; it is assembled, tasted, corrected, and given time.

A cellar led by assemblage

The method begins with natural maturity. Harvest runs from September to December, and unripe fruit stays on the ground until it is ready, even when that means returning to old pear trees more than once. Apples are sorted by variety before their rest in plastic, a choice made to avoid the flavour that wood could bring. Pears move faster, because their texture allows less margin.

After crushing and maceration, the juice goes through a band press with plastic canvas, then into stainless steel. Fermentation relies on the fruit’s own sugars and indigenous microflora, without added sugars or yeasts. The cellar’s clarity comes from that restraint. Equipment is stainless steel, and bottling, labeling and muselet placement are handled on site.

The key gesture is the blend. Ciders draw on about 20 apple varieties; poirés draw on about 15 pear varieties. Sydre Argelette, named for the local schistous gravel, keeps a fixed proportion of 40% bitter, 40% sweet and 20% acidic apples, a ratio held since the first production. The estate works organically across roughly 19–23 ha of mixed-age apple and pear orchards on schist, argelette and granite. The fruit gives Bordelet tannin, acid, sugar and perfume. The cellar gives those elements a frame.

Schist under a Norman sky

The place is quiet before it is scenic. Château de Hauteville sits among orchards rather than display gardens, with the rural estate carrying the pace of fruit work: picking, sorting, pressing, washing down, waiting. This is not a polished tourism room built around the idea of cider. It is a working house where the orchard remains the first room.

The soil explains much of the tone. The estate lies on the eastern edge of the Armorican Massif, where schist from the Biovérien, argelette gravel and a granite ridge meet a wetter climate close to Normandy. Bordelet has called it a Breton soil in a Norman climate. That is the useful map for the glass: mineral ground, cool fruit, slow ripeness, and bubbles held in check by structure.

When the work turns outward, it does so through bottles rather than spectacle. The cuvées include Sidre Brut, Poiré Authentique, Poiré Granit, Cormé and Sidre Nouvelle Vague, with Sydre Argelette carrying the house’s most exact blend. The next season begins again at the tree, with pears moving straight to the press at Château de Hauteville.