I’ve tasted this vintage in a number of bottlings over the past decade, but this one, 54 years old and bottled in 2017, was the finest Calvados I tasted for this report. This deep amber spirit is the one of the strangest, most complex spirits I’ve ever encountered. There are aromas and flavors of both forest and patisserie – butterscotch, pine, mushroom, chocolate, exotic spices. At the heart, however, there is the feeling on the midpalate of biting into the perfect homemade apple tart, which lingers through the miles-long finish. After my last tasting, Christian Drouin himself told me that he’d almost made the decision to destroy this vintage in the 1990s because it had become so undrinkable – a testament to how profoundly the aging process transforms spirits. (AOC Calvados, 42% abv.)