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How it is harvested

Gravity, sun and wind — nothing else

At spring tide, Atlantic seawater at around 25 grams of salt per litre is let into the marsh and moved by gravity through a sequence of settling and evaporation basins. Sun and wind do the concentrating. By the time the brine reaches the final crystallising cells it carries around 280 grams per litre — more than ten times where it started.

The person and the tools

The salt farmer is called a paludier. The tools are wooden and largely unchanged: a long-handled rake called a las for drawing the coarse salt to the edge of the pond, and a long-handled skimmer called a lousse for lifting fleur de sel off the surface. A day of raking yields something like 40 to 75 kilograms per person.

This is where the grey comes from

The coarse salt crystallises on and is raked across the clay floor of the pond, and picks up fine clay sediment as it goes. That is the grey. It is not, as the marketing sometimes implies, "the minerals of the ocean" — it is literally natural clay from the pond bottom, and we think that is a better story than the softened version.

Fleur de sel is a different product

Fleur de sel forms as a thin crust of delicate crystals floating on the surface of the brine, and only when the weather cooperates — dry, sunny, with an easterly wind. Rain during or just after formation destroys it. It is skimmed by hand, and a salt farmer might get two or three tonnes of it in a season against sixty to ninety tonnes of coarse grey salt. That scarcity is the price difference. It is a finishing salt; cooking it destroys the crystal structure you paid for.