Calvados Père Magloire L'experience

Wow! We were blown away by the presentation here. We wanted to do a Calvados tasting/tour, but we had 9yo Boy in tow, so we didn't want to bore him with 2 hours in a cellar. This was fantastic. We were the only ones on the tour, so we had lots of room and time to take it all in. The interactive aspects of the tour were awesome. Boy loved the little village, the orchard, the apple pile, the apple bath, and the tasting of apple juice at the end went down well, too. Steve was brilliant - he gave us a great shpiel about Magloire and Boulard, and some information about the process, the guidance of the naming of the drinks, and some extra back history. He then ran us through 6 products, tailoring to our tastes somewhat and recommending drinks he thought we should try based on our preferences. He then took us through from the tasting room to the shop and stayed on the till while were in the shop, on hand to answer any questions or help us out in any way. Very comforting to have that, when french isn't your first language. We ended up buying a bottle of Eau de vie de cidre, aged in Woodford reserve casks, which you will struggle to find on sale anywhere else. Boy chose himself a bottle of apple juice, and an apple crafted from a book, as a memento. It was a great experience from start to finish

This experience is geared to a tourist crowd - it's a "Disney" view of cider making and not a visit to a family run cidery. And what an experience it is! You are guided through several rooms of a cinematic experience as you learn about the process of making cider and calvados. The experience is extremely well done and has the capacity for large tours (though we had the luxury of a near personal tour). Then you have a fabulous tasting room experience. Our only disappointment is that we had limited space in our luggage and could not buy that much!

A really nice museum portraing the production of calvados in Normandy. It primarily consists of several rooms with videos on every step in the process and finishes off with a small tasting. I really enjoyed the experience and the only reason i am subtracting a star is because 2 of the videos were out of order today. I am sure they will get it up and running soon though and it is still well worth the visit.