⑮ About Calf: France (Part 1)

This time, the topic is calf.

"Calf" is "the leather of a calf up to 6 months old," "kip" is "leather from 6 months to under 2 years old," and "steer" is… and so on—these detailed classifications come up again and again when explaining leather. In fact, such strict categorization is something unique to Japan.
Classification overseas is much rougher, and the popular two-way choice of "calf or adult cattle" is the norm.
In Europe, calfskin is often said to be from animals "about 6 to 8 months old," but as the word "about" suggests, the general understanding is a relaxed one: "if it's roughly that age, it's calf."
Even that interpretation varies from tannery to tannery. To take a well-known example, Germany's Perlinger "Shrunken Calf" often comes in large hides that easily exceed the size of what people in Japan imagine a calf to be.
(Perhaps the small, fine-grained, top-quality calfskins are all being bought up by the world's top brands.)

In reality, even if you examine leather scientifically, there is no technology today that can tell whether it came from a 7-month-old or a 9-month-old animal. As I'll explain later, unless you are someone who can follow the records from birth to slaughter and the destination of the raw hide—that is, traceability—the reality is that no one can know the exact age in months.
At 11DROPS we use a lot of European calf, but for the reasons above, I think it is better to think of calf loosely as "roughly calf leather" rather than "strictly the leather of a calf within 6 months of birth."


Now, among these calfskins, the one I would like to touch on this time is French calf.
Why do France's prestigious tanneries, such as Tanneries Du Puy and Rémy Carriat, enjoy such enormous trust from the world's high-end brands?
This is my personal view, but I think the reasons lie in ① the quality of the raw hides, ② the beauty of the coloring, and ③ the tremendous range of color variations.

First, what underpins the beauty of the raw hides is the cold environment in which the cattle are raised. Tanneries Du Puy is said to use cattle from the Alpine region, and Rémy Carriat cattle from the Basque Country and around the Pyrenees.
With any leather, if you spread out a whole smooth hide, it is normal to find quite a few scrapes and insect-bite marks left from the animal's life.
However, in highlands with a cool climate, pests such as flies and ticks that damage the skin hardly occur. What's more, because the cattle grow up stress-free on vast pastures without barbed wire, the grain (surface) is finished in a clean state with few insect bites or scars.

That said, we must not forget that all of these leathers are by-products of Europe's meat-eating culture, and are a carefully inherited "proof of life."
The animals are not raised to obtain leather; it is precisely because there is a culture of eating veal that high-quality hides are produced as a by-product.
I wrote earlier that the definition of calf in Europe is rough, but what is interesting is that in France, "baby calf"—calves from 3 months to under 6 months old (milk-fed calves / Veau)—is clearly distinguished from "calf."
This is because baby calf is traded at high prices as the finest grade among calfskins.
These hides are carefully selected under the thorough traceability mentioned above, which means that for leather from the two major French tanneries above, it is possible to trace, to some extent, everything from the date of birth to the date of slaughter and the date the raw hide arrived.
Amazing, isn't it...

Then, once the raw hides reach the tannery, through the passion poured in by French craftspeople and traditional tanning techniques, they are elevated from mere raw hides to high-quality leather.