Kir is the perfect drink for summer. Sarah Woodward visited Burgundy's blackcurrant harvest to learn about the region's abiding fascination with cassis.
The pickers' hands, arms, even their legs are scarred from the thorns and stained a deep red with the juice. They have been picking since 5.30am and will work on until three in the afternoon, with the traditional midday break for lunch in the fields. During the ten days of the July picking season, Madame Didier is up at four each morning to prepare the casse-cro�tes for her husband, three children and brother, as well as the young friends who join them in the picking. But she isn't complaining - it was, after all, her idea to plant the blackcurrant bushes.
"I thought it would be a good idea to have a bit of variety among the vines," she explains. For we are in deepest Burgundy, high up on the C�tes, the rocky outcrops whose stony soil produces some of the best wines of the region. Her husband, Guy, was not entirely convinced. "I'm a wine man, not a cassis man myself. But," he adds, warming to his subject, "growing blackcurrants is a bit like vines - there are good years and bad years." In Guy's opinion, this is controlled by many more factors than simply the weather. "If the year ends with a nine then you will have a particularly good harvest," he opines, "because that is a year with 13 moons. And you must always prune when the moon is waning. The plant must suffer to make it produce fruit."
Such attention is not lavished on blackcurrants intended for jams and jellies. This is France, after all, and these are prize fruit, the noir de Bourgogne. They are destined to make crème de cassis, the blackcurrant liqueur that, along with white wine, makes up a kir, France's third most popular aperitif after pastis and whisky. Local producer Védrenne has bought up all of Guy's blackcurrants. This year, half a million tons of noir de Bourgogne blackcurrants will be picked in Burgundy and more than half of them will find their way to Védrenne's unobtrusive production centre in Nuits-St-Georges. Preferably on the same day that they are picked.
For the whole point about crème de cassis, production manager Yves Combaret explains, is its freshness and 'liveliness' of fruit. As soon as the blackcurrants arrive at the plant (and they can come in vast containers or in a few buckets picked from a local garden), they are weighed, crushed and mixed with sugar-beet alcohol, chosen for its neutral taste. Then they are left to macerate for at least a month, during which time the huge stainless-steel tanks are turned every day to make sure the maximum juice is extracted. At the end of the maceration period, the juice is drawn off and only then is the fruit pressed. The pressing and maceration juices are mixed in a rough proportion of 1:2 before being left to rest, and finally filtered. At this point, the juice is mixed with sugar. Yves explains that his aim is to "get the very essence of blackcurrant. And to do that you have to have the best, most mature fruit from the right growing places or terroir, use a lot of it in proportion to the alcohol, make it under the right conditions - and use no additives."
Yves's factory is a paragon of modern technology and the entire production process takes place under conditions of sous-vide or vacuum, to make sure that no oxygen ever reaches the fruit to taint its flavour. But over a glass of kir in the garden of Joel Védrenne, grandson of the firm's founder, it soon becomes clear that this is a recent development. Joel joined the family firm (now sold on) as production manager in 1954, and one of his main jobs was to look after the wooden casks in which crème de cassis was sold right up until the late Sixties. "There were two barrel-makers working with us full-time in those days," he reminisces. "And we used to lift the fruit up in 14kg wooden buckets. Each day at harvest time, there would be a queue of horses and carts outside the plant in the morning - everyone grew cassis then and picking was a family pastime." Now, people like Monsieur Didier are an exception - most of the blackcurrant picking is done by machine.
If blackcurrants are rooted deep in the Burgundian psyche, it is purely by chance that the region became famous for them, Védrenne's general manager, Gérard Chaussée, explains. Blackcurrants had been highly prized in 18th-century France as a cure for ailments as diverse as 'ill humour' and liver disease. But as their efficacy came under doubt, so their popularity waned. Then, in 1840, a liqueur-maker, Denis Lagoute, and his distiller Claude Joly, both from Dijon, visited Paris. There they found that in the bars and bistros, a jug of ratafia, a fruit liqueur, was placed free of charge on the table, beside the mustard, pepper and salt. This ratafia was to be mixed with the mostly poor-quality wines of the time, and, although it contained all sorts of fruits, its dominant flavour was blackcurrant. On their return to Dijon, Messieurs Lagoute and Joly set about making a purely blackcurrant liqueur. And so, in 1841, crème de cassis was born.
Soon, everyone in Burgundy was planting cassis. Often it was grown as a border around the vineyards, or rows of vines would alternate with rows of blackcurrants. The bushes, it soon became clear, thrive near grapes - they appreciate both the terrain and the know-how of the peasant farmers. Blackcurrant bushes became part of the landscape. But as the region's wines became more appreciated, these bushes were pushed out of the vineyards to higher spots in the hills and woods, where they are still grown today.
There was another natural affinity between Burgundy and the blackcurrant - crème de cassis goes particularly well with the local dry white wine, Bourgogne Aligoté, as a local café boy discovered at the turn of the century. The kir was born, but it was not to get its name for another 40-odd years - it was simply called blanc-cassis, as it still is by many locals. Then, at the end of the second world war, Dijon got a new mayor, a canon who had served as a courageous Resistance leader - Chanoine Félix Kir. He served the local aperitif of blanc-cassis to everyone from Khrushchev to De Gaulle and even lent his name to the drink. Continuing the religious theme, cassis mixed with red wine is known as a Cardinal.
But the Burgundians don't just drink their local liqueur; it also finds its way into the kitchen, as local traiteur Monsieur Gouges shows me. As he whips up magret de canard or breast of duck in a blackcurrant sauce, he explains that he keeps his cassis in the fridge "so that it doesn't lose its wonderful aroma". Tipping the bottle generously into the frying pan, he adds: "And use it quickly." No problem in his kitchen - nor in the local restaurant, where we enjoy a meal with crème de cassis at every course, from the watermelon starter via the Charolais beef to the blackcurrant sauce dribbled over an alcoholic ice cream made with the local brandy.
That afternoon, I potter through one of the many pretty little villages that dot the Burgundian hillsides, nursing my digestion. As I pause to admire a wisteria-clad courtyard, an elderly lady appears from behind a rose bush. We fall into a discussion about blackcurrants and she says sadly: "Cassis for me has lost its poetry - all those machines beating up the bushes. I remember when the gypsies came to pick the fruit." Then she adds: "Of course, it still tastes good." And then she invites me inside for a glass of kir.
Cassis tastings are taking place in major Waitrose shops during the month of June. Call your local branch for details.