FINE CIDER: A new book, and the rise of the 'pommelier'
A new book on natural cider gives us hope for a brave new world of cider, says Christine Sismondo
Just when you think you’re starting to get a handle on things in the booze world, you find out about a whole new professional designation—the pommelier.
Like a sommelier (except with pommes instead of grapes), a pommelier can help bar and restaurant patrons learn about different styles of cider, so they might find the perfect one.
Now, in a lot of bars, the cider choice is basically “Strongbow or Magner’s?”, so the existence of cider sommeliers might come as a surprise to some. Slowly, though, we’re starting to see more choice. Better yet, chances are excellent that natural cider is about to blow up. And, the expressions won’t even remotely resemble what passes for cider at the sports pub these days.
The cider revolution is starting to gain ground in England (although they still have plenty of bad cider there), and there are a few good ciders starting to pop up in North America, but we have some obstacles, namely, that most of the apples we grow here aren’t great for making cider. As Felix Nash, British cider merchant and expert, explains in his awesome new book, Fine Cider: Understanding the World of Fine, Natural Cider, in the 19th century there were some 14,000 varieties of apples in the northeast of the United States alone. Now there are only about 100 commercially grown varieties.
Where did they go? It’s an old story. Those apples went the way of monoculture as orchard owners chose apples that were most commercially viable. Those tended to be big, juicy, sweet ones that appealed to consumers looking for a snack, but, sadly, mostly made terrible cider. Proper cider apples are nasty, brutish and short, or, more properly, unpalatable: hard in texture and usually small compared with, say, a Golden Delicious.
Don’t despair. There’s good news on the horizon, thanks to craft cider producers who have started to plant different varietals that make better cider here in North America. One such is Spy Cider House and Distillery, a Collingwood upstart that’s already planted cider apples. It’s a passion project founded by a few creatives, including David Butterfield, a Bermuda native famous for producing Grand Crus in Burgundy.
Yes, there’s a lot of strange sounds and cognitive dissonance in that last sentence. But we’re going to drive past that whole Bermuda part and, instead, answer the other question that might occur to readers, namely: “Why would an acclaimed winemaker be interested in cider?”
The short answer is: Despite the fact that cider gets lumped in with beer, it’s really more of a wine. It’s made with fruit, right? But it’s in there with beer, largely because of the way it’s been sold since the 1960s and 1970s, when legal definitions shifted in the United Kingdom and it suddenly became OK to sell watered-down franken-apple pop from concentrate in cans. With added sugar, of course.
That’s when the waves of mass-produced cider began. Prior to that, most cider would have been made much the same way as sparkling wine, namely, fermented from real apples, then bottled for a secondary fermentation. Fun fact: That practice, better-known as the “champagne method” is often misattributed to Dom Pérignon. The evidence suggests it was actually pioneered by British cider makers in the mid-17th century.
Obviously, the hope amongst cider advocates like Felix Nash is that laws will be reformed in order to revive traditional cider methods. That would be nice. So would a decisive election that set up a new referendum on Brexit that ultimately led to a full reversal. While we wait for that, it will fall to producers and cider advocates to educate the public about the difference between spiked apple pop and fine, natural cider. It’ll happen. It’s inevitable. The cider revolution is coming.
My advice? Buy this invaluable primer and reference book, so that when the cider finally hits, you’re ready for it. You never know, it might even inspire you to become a pommelier.