Montmorency

One cherry. One capsule. The quiet end of the day.

You used to fall asleep the moment your head touched the pillow. Now there is a window — maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour — where your brain refuses to let go of the day. You replay the conversation you should have ended differently. You think about tomorrow's meeting. You notice every floorboard above you. The light coming under the curtain seems brighter than it ever did when you were twenty.

A clean vegetable cellulose capsule. Inside, 1500mg of pure Montmorency tart cherry extract — equivalent weight from a much larger amount of fresh fruit, concentrated into a single dose. The cherry extract, with maltodextrin and a flow agent. One or two capsules with water in the evening — taken because you trust the evening ritual, not because you need fireworks.

Ninety capsules in a pot. At one a night, three months. At two, just over six weeks.

In short: vegan Montmorency cherry capsules, ninety to a pot. The ingredients are the cherry extract (Prunus cerasus), maltodextrin, the plant cellulose (HPMC) shell and a flow agent, magnesium stearate.

Montmorency is a place before it is a cherry. The Montmorency valley sits twenty kilometres north of central Paris, the old hunting grounds of the Dukes of Montmorency, who were among the oldest noble families of France — older, in fact, than the Capetian kings they served. By the seventeenth century the valley was famous for one specific thing: a sour, ruby-red cherry that grew in the orchards along the Seine tributaries, picked in late June and early July, sold in the markets of central Paris before they could spoil, and turned into syrup, jam, brandy and pie for the rest of the year.

The cherry that bears the valley's name — Prunus cerasus, the sour cherry — is not the dark sweet cherry you eat from a bag at the supermarket. It is its older, more bitter cousin. It has been cultivated since at least Roman times (the Roman general Lucullus is supposed to have brought the first sour cherries to Italy from the Black Sea coast in the first century BC, and Pliny the Elder writes about them in his Natural History). The Montmorency variety became the standard cultivar of French confiture, of clafoutis, of the tart-cherry pie that crossed the Atlantic with French settlers and became the official state dessert of Michigan, where today tart cherries are grown along the great-lakes coast where the cool, lake-moderated nights are exactly the climate the cultivar prefers.

What science noticed, much later, is that the same compounds that make Montmorency taste sour and stain your shirt deep red are an unusually rich source of two things. The first is anthocyanins — the dark purple pigments shared by blueberries, blackberries, elderberries and acai. Anthocyanins are the dark pigments of the cherry.

Tart cherries naturally contain a very small amount of melatonin.

There is also a third compound family in Montmorency worth a sentence: the procyanidins and flavonols — including quercetin, which the cherry shares with onions, capers and apple skins. Quercetin is one of the most-studied plant flavonoids of the last twenty years and contributes to the broad polyphenol profile that gives the cherry its colour, its bitterness, and most of its modern reputation.

We do not promise you eight hours of sleep. We are not a sleeping aid in the pharmacological sense. What we are saying is that the cherry has earned its place — historically, traditionally, as a fruit some people choose to take in the evening, with the same intention as a chamomile tea or a hot bath: a signal to your body that the day is done.

Most supplement brands would put six other things in this bottle and call it a sleep formula. We've kept it to one. There are two reasons.

The first is dose. To get a meaningful amount of any extract, you usually have to spend most of the capsule space on it. 1500mg of Montmorency extract per capsule.

The second is patience. A pure-extract supplement lets you find out whether this one ingredient is helping you. If you take a six-ingredient sleep blend for a month and feel better, you don't know what worked. If you take pure Montmorency for a month and feel better, you know. We'd rather give you the cleaner test.

If you want the cherry with other botanicals, see our Passion Flower Multi. This bottle, the one in your hand, is the cherry alone.

One or two capsules with water, in the evening — most people take one with their evening meal or about an hour before bed. Take 1 or 2 capsules in the evening. Do not exceed the recommended daily intake. The capsule shell is plant-derived (HPMC). The cherry does not originate from the UK.

Don't expect the kind of effect you'd get from a sleeping pill. The cherry works in the background, like a chamomile tea — gently, quietly, as part of an evening ritual that is bigger than any one ingredient.

If after sixty days nothing has changed, stop. A supplement that isn't doing anything for you isn't worth the money.

This is a food supplement — it complements a varied diet, doesn't replace one. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication (particularly any sedative, sleeping medication, or blood pressure medication), or living with a medical condition, talk to your GP or pharmacist first. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery if you find the cherry makes you drowsy in the early evening. Keep it cool, dry, sealed, out of reach of children.

The bottle is suitable for vegetarians and vegans (HPMC capsule, no gelatin). Although rigorous precautions are taken, this product is manufactured in a facility that handles allergy-based materials.

If you've read this far, thank you. We tried to write the kind of page we'd want to read before spending money — no neon promises, no overblown language. Just a sour cherry from a French valley north of Paris, concentrated into one capsule, and a small evening ritual.

— Vitadefence