mirabelle

The mirabelle is a small yellow-gold plum, botanically Prunus domestica subsp. syriaca, with the subspecies name pointing to its probable origin in the eastern Mediterranean. The fruit traveled to Western Europe through medieval trade routes crossing the Levant and Sicily. Lorraine tradition credits René of Anjou, who held the crown of Sicily and Jerusalem in the 1440s before losing both, with bringing the mirabelle to northeastern France around 1470. Whether that attribution is documented history or local legend, the plum was established in Lorraine orchards by the sixteenth century.

The name 'mirabelle' appears in French texts from the late fifteenth century. Its most plausible source is the Latin 'mirabilis,' meaning wonderful or admirable, a word applied throughout the medieval period to unusually fine fruits and plants. A competing theory traces the name to Mirabello, a place in Sicily where the plum may have been grown commercially before its French cultivation. Whichever etymology is correct, the French form was fixed by 1550 and has not varied since.

Lorraine's geography suited the mirabelle with unusual precision. The region's continental climate, with cold winters and warm summers, concentrates the fruit's sugars without producing the wateriness that afflicts mirabelles grown in wetter conditions. By the nineteenth century, orchards around Metz and Nancy were producing the fruit in quantities large enough to support a canning and distilling industry. Lorraine now grows roughly seventy percent of the world's mirabelle crop, protected since 1996 under a Label Rouge designation and since 2006 under an Indication Géographique Protégée.

The mirabelle eau-de-vie distilled in Lorraine is fermented from the whole fruit, skin and all, then double-distilled to a clear spirit. The result has a delicate, precise aroma that recalls the ripe plum without sweetness or weight. The word 'mirabelle' now functions simultaneously as a fruit name and a spirit designation, the way 'kirsch' does for cherry. In Lorraine, the distinction is unnecessary: the plum and the bottle are understood to be the same thing in two forms.