Fruit Brandies are all sorts of distillates made from wine not made from grapes.
The, by far, best known kind of Fruit Brandy is Calvados, a distillate made from apples and pears in Normandie in France.
Much like Cognacs and Armagnacs, the wine it is based on are too sour and bitter to enjoy as is, but excellent for distilling and ageing.
Calvados also have a set of rules it has to follow, in order to maintain a constant level of quality and to protect the shared brand name that Calvados has become.
These rules include what kinds of apples and pears are allowed to use, how to age the distillates and how, when to harvest, how to harvest, when to distill, and so forth.
Calvados as a brand have always suffered a bit in the shadows of Cognac and Armagnac, but have really grown in renown in recent years.
In fact, producers in Calvados have struggled for many a year to get the French to understand that Calva is a product of worth. This conception of Calvados as a “product without value” actually stems from cafes in Paris (and therefore all the other cities, obviously) serving coffee to early bird workers on their way to work, with calvados in it. Actually, to get a non alcoholic coffee, you had to order “Café naturelle”, and pay more. What you got, if you ordered Coffee in the morning, was coffee with calva. It was that common.
So, with the french so used to the calva therefore being so cheap it was free in the coffee, they didn’t take it very seriously when the Normans tried to charge for their product.
This wasn’t such a big problem in other markets, however, and Calvados have long been a french export of respectable volume.
Much like Cognac and Armagnac, Calvados also use a ageing hierarchy as a note of quality. Their system is as follows;