Binet 1660
Binet 1660 is the salt label of Grand Cru de Batz, a house that harvests fleur de sel and gray sea salt in the salt marshes of Batz-sur-Mer, on the Guérande peninsula in southern Brittany. Its salts are gathered by hand, drained naturally, sorted grain by grain, and sold in vintaged, numbered tins produced in limited quantities.
The house
The name looks back to Georges Binet, a chamberlain to Louis XIV, who in 1660 brought salt from the Batz marshes to the royal table; the family was ennobled in 1718. A line handed down through the generations sums up the house's rule: the king's salt shall crystallize in the marshes of Batz, never mixed, never crushed. The marshes themselves are far older. Their clay basins, laid out over an extremely rich blue clay, were traced by Benedictine monks roughly a thousand years ago, and the knowledge of working them has passed from paludier to paludier ever since. Batz-sur-Mer calls itself the historic capital of salt.
The tools are still the traditional ones. The las pushes the water to roll coarse gray salt toward the edge of the pan, and the lousse skims the surface to lift the fragile fleur de sel that forms on top. The house relies on water, earth, wind and sun and on the paludier's judgment, and it works with Michelin-starred chefs on its range.
What happens after the harvest sets Binet 1660 apart. The salts drain naturally for around nine months to keep their minerals, and every grain is then sorted by hand, a task entrusted to a team of workers with disabilities whose precision and patience the house singles out. The salt is packed by hand as well. The result is a salt with no additives, no washing and no grinding.
What they make
The heart of the Clipperton range is the trio of wind cuvées, fleur de sel harvested only when a particular wind is skimming the pans. West Wind gives generous, exceptionally crunchy crystals for meat, fish and vegetables. East Wind forms lighter, airier flakes, suited to fish, pastry and dessert. South Wind, the rarest of the three, is a fine, powdery, snow-like crystal for raw fish, scallops and anything where subtlety matters.
Two smoked salts follow. The Smoked Fleur de Sel blends West and East Wind crystals and cold-smokes them slowly over beech wood in small batches. The Smoked and XO Cognac Flamed Fleur de Sel is smoked over oak and chestnut and then flamed with French XO Cognac, a prestige finishing salt for grilled meat, foie gras, dark chocolate and cheese. The unrefined Coarse Grey Salt, crystallized directly on the clay floor of the pans, is the everyday cooking salt of the range. All come in 100 g tins.
- Fleur de sel: West Wind, East Wind, South Wind
- Smoked fleur de sel: beech-smoked, and oak and chestnut-smoked then Cognac-flamed
- Coarse gray sea salt
See the whole range in the Binet 1660 collection.
Why Clipperton chose them
Clipperton is a family importer, and salt is one of the products where the difference between real and industrial is easiest to taste. We wanted a fleur de sel that still comes from a paludier's lousse in the marshes of Batz, sorted by hand and never ground, and Binet 1660 is that. Its wind cuvées also tell a story no other salt does: the same pan, a different wind, a different crystal. We bring it to Canada and the United States directly from the house, tin by numbered tin.
