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N1 · category

Fruit spirits

Family
Single-distillate spirit
Raw materials
Fruit
Place of origin
Alsace & Central Europe
Location map: the indicative position of Fruit spirits, with no outline. Scale: 250 km. ParisLyonMarseilleBordeauxToulouseNantesLilleStrasbourg 250 km
Indicative marker — a point, and nothing more Indicative position — no outline is loaded

Kirsch, mirabelle, Williams pear, quetsche: distillates of fermented fruit, with no added sugar. An Alsatian, German and Central European tradition.

Its colour, and what colour owes to craft

Amber that must be earned — a year in wood before any adjustment. See the six regimes of colouring

Black-and-white photograph of a still mounted on a four-wheeled cart chassis: boiler, copper head, column and condenser lined up on the trailer, shown on a fair stand.
The travelling still of the home distiller (bouilleur de cru), shown at the agricultural machinery fair in January 1927: the workshop comes to the orchard rather than the other way round. It is the French form of peasant distillation, and it fits on a trailer. VIe salon de la machine agricole, alambic Coyac de Nantes, Agence Rol (photographie de presse), 1927. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF, ark:/12148/btv1b53172665b — public domain.
The thing to remember

Several kilos of fruit go into a single bottle — hence their status as a rare product.

Terroirs and geographical indications

The recognised production areas attached to this category in the Atlas.

Sources and validation

Sources of the corpus
Names and statuses: eAmbrosia, the official register of geographical indications of the European Union. Geometries: INAO, Délimitation des aires géographiques des SIQO (27/07/2026), Licence Ouverte v2.0, reprojected to WGS84.
Corpus updated on
1 August 2026
Validation
Seed entry Corpus under construction. Each entry is checked and sourced before validation by the future scholarly board. Protection status and mode of location are carried by each entry: an area delimited by a product specification and a reference-town point do not carry the same weight.

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