Damasson rouge
A little red plum from Ajoie, in the Jura, picked up by hand once it has fallen from the tall orchard trees, between mid-July and late September. It is made into tarts or jam.
An August morning in Ajoie, under a tall plum tree. The grass has been mown and a net stretched beneath the branches. People bend down to pick up, one by one, the red plums that have fallen since the day before: anyone who wants the designation may neither pick them from the tree nor shake it.
Origin
According to the Swiss PDO-PGI Association, crusaders supposedly brought this plum tree back from the Levant during the 13th century; Culinary Heritage of Switzerland urges caution, since almost everything that came from the East was then described as “from Damascus”. Its cultivation in the Jura is not attested in writing until 1860, in Ajoie, a land of orchards. But a “rouge prusnier” recorded at Court in 1655 suggests that it grew there earlier, since the local plums were blue.
Growing
The size of a mirabelle, the fruit has pink to dark red skin, speckled with dark spots on the sunny side, yellow-orange in the shade, under a bluish bloom. Its tall, high-stem trees stand alone in meadow orchards or in hedgerows. They send up suckers of their own accord, but many are grafted: the two are never mixed, and the label states where the fruit comes from. According to Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, a tree grown from a sucker bears a good crop only about one year in seven, a grafted tree one year in two. The harvest runs from the middle of July to late September; livestock are taken out of the meadow at least two weeks beforehand.
At the table
Tarts and jams have always been made from it, notes the summary published by the Federal Office for Agriculture. When fully ripe, the plum is juicy, and its stone comes away easily. But most of the crop ends up in the still: the whole fruit, stones included, is put into casks the same day or the next to become Damassine.
Today
The designation protects the spirit rather than the fruit: Damassine became an AOP by a decision of 2007, definitively registered in 2010, and everything, from orchard to bottle, is done within the Jura. The rules also look after the trees: each new planting mixes young trees from several orchards in the canton, to preserve the great diversity of damassine trees. The label names the municipality where the fruit was gathered. The spirit from a harvest waits until St. Martin’s Day of the following year to be sold.
Sources: Culinary Heritage of Switzerland, entry “Damassine (AOP)”; Swiss PDO-PGI Association, factsheet “Damassine AOP”; Federal Office for Agriculture, summary of the registration application “Damassine” (2005) and specification “Damassine”.