Three pips, three fruits: Trois Pépins is Jacques Perritaz's most famous cuvée, an equal-parts blend of apples, pears and quinces — the pear brings roundness and minerality, the apple brings tension, the quince brings that floral perfume. Perritaz himself shrugs that the blend is "a bit random but it works well," which is about as Swiss an understatement as you'll find. He was a biologist for the Swiss Government before he stumbled into cider, setting up a small mill in an old tile factory in Gruyère in 2000 and building it on foraged fruit from untreated, high-branched trees (1.8 to 2 meters), growing on deep molasse over Valais schist or moraine gravel mixed with brown clay. The method is patient and hands-off: partial fermentation with indigenous yeasts in stainless steel, a couple of light filtrations to land on the right residual sugar, then a natural prise de mousse in bottle and barely any sulfur (around 20mg/L). It's labelled sec and it drinks dry. The cidrerie takes its name from the vulcain — the red admiral butterfly that feeds on the juice of fallen apples, and which you'll find on the label. Perritaz says this one wants two to three years in bottle, so there's no rush.