Giffard Crème De Cassis D'Anjou (Blackcurrant) (700 ml)

When pharmacist Émile Giffard founded his Avrillé house in 1885, he applied a chemist's discipline to flavour extraction — isolating botanical essences with the same rigour used to purify medicinal compounds. That founding logic governs this Crème de Cassis today, five generations later.

The blackcurrants are 'Noir de Bourgogne' variety, sourced entirely from within the Pays de la Loire — every berry within 30 miles of the Avrillé distillery — placing this squarely in the Loire Valley's agricultural heartland, France's second-largest farming region, where the temperate Atlantic climate and alluvial soils produce fruit with pronounced acidity and deep anthocyanin pigment.

Production follows Giffard's controlled maceration protocol: fresh fruit steeped in neutral spirit distilled from sugar beet, with light, temperature, and oxygen carefully managed to preserve both colour integrity and aromatic fidelity. The base spirit is sweetened with sugar beet sugar. No wood aging is applied. Each batch is tasted before bottling, with filtration as a final quality-control step.

What separates this from Burgundy-appellation cassis is the deliberate Loire provenance — the 'Anjou' designation signals a regional identity distinct from Dijon's more famous production, anchored in fruit grown on the same alluvial plain that feeds the Loire's great white wines. The result is a cassis of vivid, true-to-berry colour and sharp fruit intensity rather than confected sweetness.