Le Paulmier: Vinegars from the Orchards and Hedgerows of the Pays d’Auge

In 1588 a Norman physician named Julien Le Paulmier published a treatise on wine and cider, one of the first serious studies of the apple and its drink. Four centuries later, a small vinegar maker on the southwestern edge of the Pays d’Auge, between the valleys of Camembert and Livarot, took his name. Le Paulmier makes vinegars and condiments from what that countryside gives: cider apples and perry pears first, then the wild plants of its pastures, hedgerows and forests.

Orchard and hedgerow

The house, led by Benoît, sees itself as a defender of the natural riches of the Pays d’Auge, a landscape of orchards, dairy pasture and hedgerows it describes as fragile and exceptionally diverse. Its products draw on old links between orchard and hedgerow that have largely been forgotten.

Slow vinegar

The methods are the classic ones, done without hurry. Cider is made from local sweet and bittersweet apples grown in traditional open orchards. After its alcoholic fermentation, it becomes vinegar through a traditional acetic fermentation, some of it on wood, then matures for at least six months in oak or acacia casks. That is the house’s organic Apple Cider Vinegar.

Some vinegars then go back into barrels with plants gathered from the wild: wild garlic from the alder groves, hand-picked in April; elderflower; the young shoots of Douglas fir from the forests of the Orne, which give the Fir Vinegar its notes of lemon and lemongrass. A few are smoked over local hardwoods.

La Pommée

The signature of the house starts somewhere else entirely. La Pommée begins not with fermented alcohol but with fresh apple must, reduced over a wood fire and then married to a cider-apple acidulate aged for five years. The result is glossy, slightly syrupy and far gentler than an ordinary vinegar: an apple balsamic, close to the fruit, with a sweetness that never cloys. La Pommée Smoked is double-smoked, and the seasonal La Pommée des Bois is macerated with chestnuts, acorns and roasted hazelnuts.

How we use them

• La Pommée anywhere you would reach for balsamic: on strawberries, a goat cheese, roasted squash or a deglazed pan.
• Wild garlic vinegar in a potato salad or a vinaigrette for spring vegetables.
• Fir vinegar with raw fish, oysters or a cucumber salad.
• The cider vinegar for everyday dressings and pickles.

Read the full story on our Le Paulmier page, find every bottle in the Le Paulmier collection, and for the wider story of French vinegar, our guide French vinegar, the quiet secret of the French kitchen.