Wine of wild orchards Print E-mail
Written by Carolle Doyle, 2008   
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It was the Normans who first showed us how to ferment apples - a fruit that had been introduced to these shores by the Romans. Now, says Carolle Doyle, real cider is making a comeback

Laurie Lee has a lot to answer for. In his well loved country idyll Cider with Rosie he gave the fermented juice of the apple an image that has stayed with us ever since.

He wrote of fruit from the tree of knowledge, fermented and drunk beneath a haywain in a lusty toast to the loss of innocence. To be fair to Lee, he was describing a sweet intoxication most of us associate with cider and all of us associate with scrumpy.

The very name 'scrumpy' conjures up a cloudy, rough-hewn cider that will take the legs out from under you. But Laurie Lee's "secret drink of golden fire", the "wine of wild orchards", has little to do with the carbonated, pasteurised stuff made from imported concentrate that is sold cheaply by the litre.

Real cider, like real ale, takes simple ingredients and presents us with a drink where the yeast has worked the magic of fermentation without recourse to chemicals or additives.

At its simplest, cider is made by crushing apples that then ferment naturally due to the wild yeast present on their skins, like real ales and real ciders which are making a comeback, helped along by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), which has taken cider and perry (the fermented juice of pears) under its wing.

Trees that were grubbed up by the million are being reinstated and the old cider apple varieties Fillbarrel, Slack ma Girdle and the incomparable Kingston Black are being planted once more.

Although we have unfortunately lost 60 per cent of our apple orchards countrywide, cider making has returned to the centuries-old pattern of being a cottage industry and an integral part of the farm.

We think of the apple as a uniquely English fruit but like much else it was the Romans who introduced cultivated apples to England.

We didn't turn our apples into cider until the arrival of the Normans who brought Pearmain apples and their cider-making traditions to our shores. The monasteries took it up and it is thanks to the followers of St Augustine that Kent became the first county to take up apple growing in any quantity.

French trees

Just as the Normans brought the Pearmain, so the French had the monopoly on first class varieties throughout the Middle Ages. Then in 1533 Richard Harris, fruiterer to Henry VIII, transformed the orchards by importing the very trees that made the French orchards superior to our own.

Over the next two centuries, cider orchards spread away from the south east to the West Country which is, to our minds, their natural home.

Devon, Somerset, Laurie Lee's Gloucestershire and Herefordshire gave us our cider orchards and new cider apple varieties. Fair Maid of Devon is obvious, but that county also gave us Court Royal, Major and dozens more. Somerset gave us Dabinett, Crimson King and Stoke Red, with far too many others to mention.

When you read those wonderful old names, you begin to understand some of the complexity and pleasure of real ciders for at their best they are a blend of apples.

Each apple variety is as distinct as the notes on a scale and each can be measured in terms of sweetness or bitterness. Their names betray them: Sweet Coppin, Ellis Bitter, Morgan Sweet and Killerton Sharp. Blended together they can produce ciders that are sweet, medium-sweet or dry.

There is a cider for every palette and we really should look to our heritage and rediscover this grand drink of the English countryside. Where we should go to find it is in the very places where it is made.

There are cider orchards in almost every county if you really look for them, but the majority are in Herefordshire. This is the county, after all, where the great cider house of Bulmers has its home. Westons is here, too.

This is our fourth-largest producer but, as five generations of the Weston family will attest, they are traditional cider-makers, harvesting and using only local apples as, indeed, they have done down the centuries.
 
Thanks to these old cider-making families, the orchards lingered longer here than elsewhere. It is here that the renaissance in cider-making began and it is here that you will find dozens of small cider presses and farmers who have gone back to the old tradition of making cider - although the days are long gone when farmers made cider for their farm workers (and often paid part of their wage in cider, too).

The knowledge, along with remnants of the old orchards, remains. Now apple trees are being planted once more and the cider that is being made is truly a drink of golden fire. Drink it down and then sing the old Devon song that begins, "I were brought up on cider and I be a hundred and two."
 
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