Wine Opinion: Couple revive traditional cider making in Normandy

The village of L'Hermitiere barely counts 300 inhabitants to its name. A cobbled central square, a line of low-slung stone cottages, a strikingly incongruent chateau, and you're done. It's as if you're leaving the hamlet, barely aware of having arrived in it, as you pass the neat rows of apple trees on either side of the narrow road, branches dotted with a rash of green, yellow and reddening fruit.

If you had passed through here 100 years ago, when the first world war was raging among these now quiet villages, these trees would have been commonplace, with their soft white flowers in springtime, and their beautiful names like medieval saints - St Hilaire, Frequin, Boué, Locard Vert, Damelot - signifying types of apples that are by turn sweet, acidic and bitter.

War diaries talk about using apple trees as tent pegs, the fruit as precious replenishments. It was never imagined that the war, which saw countless thousands of local Normandy boys never return home, would also strike a near-fatal blow to the cider industry that had been an essential part of the economy since the first guild for cider producers was formed in 1608.

"The local soldiers, the ones who did return, had developed a liking for wine while they were away fighting," cider maker Dominique Plessis says. "So even if there were a few more hands to make the cider than there had been during the war, the local market for it began to shrink."

Things grew even worse after the second world war, when national food shortages were so crippling that the government offered subsidies to local farmers to pull up any remaining apple trees and turn the land over to grow corn, wheat and other "more useful" crops.