Tasting Britain
If you have never been to Herefordshire, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Herefordshire, in my heart, is the home of cider. It is where I fell in love with cider and perry. The soft, green hills and regimented orchards are quintessential England to me; breathtakingly beautiful, rural, ancient. I am a fierce believer that there is so much more to food and drink than how it tastes - a sad but widely held belief is that beer tastes like beer and that is the end of the experience.
Not only must you engage all your senses to get the most out of the experience but things like company, and setting, and mood are so important to your appreciation and enjoyment. One of my favourite drinking memories was sitting, huddled around a furnace in the depths of a chilly pressing season, in the barn at Ross Cider with Mike, Albert, John and a Canadian called Nick. We drank our way through numerous single variety ciders guided all the way by the experienced palates of John and Mike who had been drinking these varieties and their differing vintages for years.
Fundamentally, the ciders would not have been any different if I had drunk them alone on a beach but they smelt, tasted, even looked better in that dimly lit barn, mere feet from where they were pressed, yards from where the apples were grown, guided by the custodians of that juice as it became cider. If you want to taste but more importantly experience the British countryside, the longtime beating heart of Britain, then you must drink cider.
In my last article I talked about the need for a more wine-like evaluation of cider including the need to understand the geographies and localities that the apples came from.
We know from wine grapes and hops that growing the same variety in different geographies will result in subtle differences based on rainfall, sunlight, soil composition and many other factors. Apples are no different.
James Finch’s recent article on Dabinett is a wonderful deep dive into the ways in which one variety can be so different when presented in a cider. We are a long way off but cider is creeping towards discussing ciders through the lens of terroir and variety rather than merely sweetness and dryness.
In a world where cider has been homogenised, carbonated and sweetened to within an inch of its life we have lost something: that sense of locality, of drinking something that was grown, pressed and fermented just a few miles away. This is a subject which has been touched on already on Burum with Rachel’s wonderful Welsh wine piece last month. It is common, in beer, to drink local beers; a tradition that harks back to the days before refrigeration when there was a brewery every few miles. You can make no better decision after reading this article than finding your closest cider-maker and trying some of their dry draught cider - certainly in these uncertain times, you will at worst just be supporting a small, local business.
But to better understand British cider and its relationship with the land let us examine the two prevailing geographies within the country, which broadly reflect what most people in the industry would refer to as the two cider styles of the UK. We have the West Country, which if you asked my Dorsetian mum, would merely be Dorset, Devon, Somerset and Cornwall, but for the purposes of cider fruit orchards we need to include the three counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire (this will no doubt prove contentious). The West Country in cider terms reflects those areas that still grow a large amount of cider fruit which has given the “style” its characteristic tannin, body and depth - and at times a considerable amount of acceptable acetic acid: a conversation for another article.
Contrast this to the Eastern Counties which is broadly the eastern swathe of England from Kent to Norfolk. Once upon a time all the orchards in this part of England were teeming with cider fruit but as the population of London grew, and its appetite for fresh fruit grew with it, those orchards turned to dessert fruit. Today Eastern Counties cider most often refers to cider that is made from sweet, sharp eating and cooking apples - tart, light in body, full of green and red apple flavours. In my opinion sorely underappreciated in certain cider circles but these ciders are part of a living history as much as any funky, tannic, traditional West Country cider. There is a small part of me that thinks I have never truly experienced an Eastern Counties-type cider because I have never been to Nightingale or Pang Valley and sat with those cider-makers while drinking their cider in situ, preferably in blistering heat.
Which brings us back to that memory in the barn in Herefordshire. Drinking those ciders, with the people who made them, on the land where the apples grew is as close as it gets. The microclimate, the microflora and fauna, those wild yeasts they use to ferment: all unique, all contribute to what goes into the glass. It is a privilege that everyone should seek if they can and it did more to enhance my understanding of what cider was and what it could be than any other experience I have had in the world of cider. One of my good friend Albert Johnson’s favourite things to quote is James Forbes from Little Pomona telling him that “cider is the ultimate expression of the people who make it.”
And James could not be more right, but when you remember those Eastern Counties orchards that were turned to dessert fruit way back when you realise that the ciders made there reflect not only the folk who press and ferment that juice but those that converted and tended those orchards and their fruit over the last few hundred years. Cider is the ultimate expression of our countryside, its history, its people. And it is a crying shame that when you say cider to someone they often think Strongbow, or Magners, maybe Thatchers at best. We need to start rethinking cider, go out and buy some local cider and reflect on its history and its provenance.
