The Sweet Liqueurs

“We feel that we should offer to our guests,” Mademoiselle Vivette said,“some of the spécialités of our Dauphiné and Savoy regions and so we buy, as much as possible, the products of local distillers. First, naturally, there are the extraordinary liqueurs which have carried the name of our Valley to every corner of the world, our Green Chartreuse and Yellow Chartreuse, made for more than two hundred and fifty years from the secret recipe of Les Pères Chartreux, who live in the monastery at the peak of our Valley. Their green liqueur also comes in a more aromatic and luxurious version under a V.E.P. label, which means that the vieillissement, the aging, has been extra-prolonged. Then, our cellar also proposes the famous cherry liqueur distilled in the mountain valley where the best cherries grow, at the Côte Saint-André, near the village of Roybon. There are also liqueurs made from the brown Williams pear in our Isère Valley. There is the specialty of our city of Grenoble, the cherry Ratafia. We also buy, in the small town of Voiron, just about five miles outside our Valley, a series of locally distilled sweet spirits of which I approve because they are strongly characteristic of our region. They include a walnut liqueur, a hazelnut liqueur, a wild Alpine raspberry, a sweet génépi made from the long yellow roots of the mountain gentian, and a concoction known as 'Spirit of the Glaciers’—flavored with mint and with a fine blue color, exactly as we see it among our highest mountains in the early morning light. There is also a local gin with bits of gold leaf floating in it—an obvious imitation of the German Goldwasser. We do not think that gold leaf adds very much to the bouquet or flavor, but we keep it in our cellar for guests to whom appearance means everything. Last of all, in the village of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont which guards the gateway to our Valley there is a local distillation called Le Bonal which, one might say, is a locally acquired taste.”