Compound drinker

However, as my career progressed, I learnt the hard way that the phrase cider is wine carries weight to it, a weight that can quickly turn unpleasant depending on who you speak to. Speaking at an industry event, I began to make comparisons between cider and wine only to be interrupted by a very loud “NO”. Now, as uncalled for as that interaction was, it did start a train of thoughts: who am I to decide what cider is and is not? Why should my limited experiences of this world get to frame the idea of cider, a drink I have only been drinking for a few years? What does cider have to say about all of this?

I began to pay attention to the ways in which cider is portrayed. It felt to me that cider is a child caught up in a custody battle between beer and wine, two drinks that have both resigned themselves to being very separate entities, but which have both adopted cider for different reasons. What makes beer want to include cider but not wine? Why does cider often get described as being wine and not the other way around? Who is right and who is wrong here?

Let’s start with a brief, bastardised history of alcoholic drinks in Britain. Apples are not native to these soils—neither are grapes—but it was apple trees that took to the British climate with an enthusiasm that most vines could not be persuaded to muster. Great Britain, then, has a long and localised history with cider and beer in a way that wine does not, irrespective of the fact that wine and cider are made using different methods to the brewing process. 

Wine was a foreign import, making beer and cider easily accessible in every sense of the word. Cider could therefore be drunk and sold in the same measures and places—and more importantly for the same cost!—that beer was, whilst wine was billed as a luxurious item by the merchants looking to profit from it. So what does Cider have to gain from being associated with beer?

Beth Demmon is a freelance writer from the United States whose book, The Beer Lover's Guide to Cider, will be published in the Autumn. Beth has used her experience and knowledge of beer to start looking at cider in a new light. 

“In the US, a lot of people don't drink cider because they don't know what it is and there aren't a lot of readily available resources to find out more,” Beth tells me. “Beer, on the other hand, won't shut up about itself. Why shouldn't cider give it a run for its money as a legitimate and comparatively untapped alternative?

“Cider is not beer. But if you present it as an exciting alternative waiting for curious drinkers to start developing their own preferences, that just seems like a good thing to me.”

Cider, just as Beth says, is not beer, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t comparisons to be drawn, lessons to be learned or new drinks to be discovered as a result of drinking, making or working with the two together. If beer leads people to cider and cider can improve on itself as a result, then that, to me, also seems like a good thing. 

Wine on the other hand is made in a very similar way to cider and it is here the comparisons really start to jump out. To make both, fruit must be grown, picked, pressed and fermented until alcoholic. On paper the two can seem very interchangable—what is cider if not apple wine, what is wine if not grape cider?

What, indeed. I’ve stopped apologising for comparing cider to wine, because it is in the Venn diagram between the two that I have begun to really understand both drinks. My background in wine has provided an invaluable framework for learning about cider and it is in drinking more cider that I have begun to feel more certain in my communication of all aspects of wine. 

But it must get frustrating always being compared to something that doesn’t quite resemble you the way some may think. Because when cider is left to speak for itself, on its own terms, it has some really beautiful things to say.

When I think of what cider has to say for itself, I think of orchards. I think of apple seeds making their journey all the way to Hereford from their origins in Kazakhstan and finding a home, firmly planting roots, its bark and branches growing doggedly towards the sun. I think of all of the people—past, present and future—who have shaped those orchards, tended to them, sung to them, who have taken fruit far too acidic and tannic to be eaten and fermented it into something so enchantingly golden it has, on many occasions, taken my breath away. 

So it would seem, after all this, that I can only tell you what cider is to me. I hope in return that you take the time to listen to what cider has to say to you, too.