Vincent Fritzsche
Vincent Fritzsche
The idea of cider always interests me more than what I taste. I'm sure I'm failing somewhere, but there you go.
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Cider
- Thread starter Cory Cartwright
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Jeff Connell
Jeff Connell
Poiré, not spoofed. Though his cidres, you might think have a bit of pear in them.originally posted by BJ:
The first spoofed cidre.originally posted by Michael Lewis:
Eric BordeletI have not read the article, so if this is mentioned, forgive me, but does anyone have any experience with Eric Bordelet's ciders? Envoyer was selling some of these last year and I think I picked up a couple but haven't opened them yet. The Poire Granit is made from 300-year-old pear trees.
Jeff Connell
Jeff Connell
For cider, Steve Woods, of Poverty Lane Orchard. His Farnum Hill ciders are wonderful - cider grown on trees, by a man who loves his trees. Also West County Cider make it real. I've had some true artisan ciders from Oregon and Washington, whose names escape me at the moment.originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
I just read Pollan's Botany of Desire and enjoyed its revision of the popular Johnny Appleseed tale. Apparently, up to Prohibition, apples were grown in the U.S. predominantly in order to ferment them into cider.
Who leads the charge for the U.S. in artisinal cider and apple-derived distilled spirits?
As far as I can tell, the cider makers keep their spirits in the orchard.
Coat-Albret from Brittany (Loic Berthelot) has been working very well for me.
Matteo Mollo
Matteo Mollo
Ed Behr sourced a couple of the bordelet ciders from us a few months back when they were assembling this lovely piece. I remember getting him some of each cuvee; i always like the poire granite the best, though it is pricy (but sells well during the turkey holidays). I remember there being room in one of the shipping boxes (which is hard to believe since the bordelet bottles are soooo obnoxiously punted--fuck tradition, i want crown caps and easy bottle shapes damn it!) and tossing in an older vintage that id been holding on to just to show the funk (brett) that comes out with aging his stuff. In general i like his stuff and like the AoE even more.
Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis
Got curious and opened some of the Bordelet last week. These are more just recollections than notes, but:
2008 Sydre Doux - Very clean, thick apple flavors. Gentle mousse, which I would have preferred to be more prickley, or something, given that this seemed heavy and needed some kind of lift. The residual sugar was very noticeable and the acidity wasn't sufficient to keep it balanced. This style is just not for me.
2009 Poiré Granit - This I found much more enjoyable. Clear pear flavors, perhaps not quite as clean as the Sydre Doux but still far from funky. The gentle mousse works better here because the cidre is already fresh with good acids and is a heck of a lot drier.
Matteo, I have one more of the 2009 Poiré Granit laying around. You mentioned that these do develop some funk with age. Any rough idea on how long it will take to start to see some of that?
2008 Sydre Doux - Very clean, thick apple flavors. Gentle mousse, which I would have preferred to be more prickley, or something, given that this seemed heavy and needed some kind of lift. The residual sugar was very noticeable and the acidity wasn't sufficient to keep it balanced. This style is just not for me.
2009 Poiré Granit - This I found much more enjoyable. Clear pear flavors, perhaps not quite as clean as the Sydre Doux but still far from funky. The gentle mousse works better here because the cidre is already fresh with good acids and is a heck of a lot drier.
Matteo, I have one more of the 2009 Poiré Granit laying around. You mentioned that these do develop some funk with age. Any rough idea on how long it will take to start to see some of that?
Matteo Mollo
Matteo Mollo
Well, in my experience i think little more time would be needed...i was referring to vintages like 2001 and 2002(amazing stuff) of the granit. Ive seen noticeable, interesting and pleasurable evolution on vintages of the 2006/7 Sydre Argelette (apples) respectively in recent times. I recall a 2003 of Argelette that was certainly damaged at some point in its life...it had a heartbeat to say the least (not in a good way).
FWIW the Sydre Doux will now be bottled as "Sydre Tendre" for legal reasons regarding products that are called "doux".
FWIW the Sydre Doux will now be bottled as "Sydre Tendre" for legal reasons regarding products that are called "doux".
Putnam Weekley
putnam
I became curious about cider after reading Botany of Desire (while listening to Desire Caught by the Tail? I don't remember). Then I retooled my answer to the question, "what do I think about Michigan - or Midwestern - wine?" Answer: the Midwest can grow amazing apples!
Meagerly I hunted for tell of heirloom cider apples. Then I fell for testing combinations of dessert apples and crabapples, ground, pressed and fermented, sometimes spontaneously.
I've tried to gather samples from north America. I learned that the artisan cider movement is particularly strong in New Hampshire. Beyond that, there seems to be fitful attempts to transport interesting European apple ferments. Anyone try Oliver's when fresh? I remember some amazing sexy hazy apple and pear froths at a festival in Freiburg on the upper Rhein ... Which leads me to this tentative conclusion:
As delicate and un-bottleable as natural wine can be, so the more difficult is the packaging and delivery of great cider. Maybe it's like bread or coffee, potentially best close to the source.
So, gathering examples of inspired cidermaking is interesting. I eagerly await the replies here!
Meagerly I hunted for tell of heirloom cider apples. Then I fell for testing combinations of dessert apples and crabapples, ground, pressed and fermented, sometimes spontaneously.
I've tried to gather samples from north America. I learned that the artisan cider movement is particularly strong in New Hampshire. Beyond that, there seems to be fitful attempts to transport interesting European apple ferments. Anyone try Oliver's when fresh? I remember some amazing sexy hazy apple and pear froths at a festival in Freiburg on the upper Rhein ... Which leads me to this tentative conclusion:
As delicate and un-bottleable as natural wine can be, so the more difficult is the packaging and delivery of great cider. Maybe it's like bread or coffee, potentially best close to the source.
So, gathering examples of inspired cidermaking is interesting. I eagerly await the replies here!
Matteo Mollo
Matteo Mollo
!
georg lauer
georg lauer
So, gathering examples of inspired cidermaking is interesting. I eagerly await the replies here!
In the area in Germany around my home town (that would be Wuerttemberg) making cider is a very old tradition and it was typically the drink of choice with Vesper (cold cuts and bread) for the many families that could not afford much else. When I was young most families would make their own (though these were all flat), since most families also owned little parcels of land along the hillsides, above the fields and beneath the woods. They are called "Streuobstwiesen", translating into scattered fruit tree meadows, since they are typicvally just meadows with random fruit trees sitting on them. They are very characteristic for our landscape and the trees are mostly apples, but also pears, cherries and plums as well as the occasional quinze, mirabelle etc. Most of those trees are very old local varieties and thankfully there is currently renewed interest in maintaining these unique ecosystems that were under threat for the typical reasons everywhere.
Recently sparkling cider has seen a renaissance and I regularly get them from two producers and bring a few bottles over. One of them has a quite extensive website that tells you a lot about what is happening and is even in english. They use quite interesting fruit.
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www.manufaktur-joerg-geiger.de
Putnam Weekley
putnam
Cool! So I suppose I was drinking from streuobstwiesen in Freiburg. Man, I'd like to revisit that.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
Were you in Freiberg? I was too. Visiting my best friend's home there, we used to drink hard cider with meals, then he'd carve off bits of his dad's home-made speck and we'd finish with a searing glass of Kirsch. Good times.
McCullough's biography of Adams talks about New Englanders in the 18th-19th century starting the morning with mugs of hard cider and building through the day upon the foundation thus laid down.
What is it about grapes that makes their fermented juice so much more varied and interesting than cider?
McCullough's biography of Adams talks about New Englanders in the 18th-19th century starting the morning with mugs of hard cider and building through the day upon the foundation thus laid down.
What is it about grapes that makes their fermented juice so much more varied and interesting than cider?
Ken Schramm
Ken Schramm
I had a long talk with Charles McGonegal from AEppelTreow Winery about that very concept. He is convinced that along with the sugar levels, the number and variety of flavor and aroma compounds in great wine grapes is just much higher. He had looked at some analytic data to back up his claim. I can't say as I can cite his evidence for that, but from personal experience I found it hard to disagree.
The genomic data on vinifera shows the results of centuries of (genetic modification/selection) to include a much higher proportion of genes that contribute to metabolic pathways that provide pleasant smellies.
I don't think that apples have been subject to the same degree of selection. Maybe the longer generation time makes it harder? Maybe propagation from seeds rather than clonally makes it harder to preserve the preferred mutants? I'm not enough of a biologist to say.
I don't think that apples have been subject to the same degree of selection. Maybe the longer generation time makes it harder? Maybe propagation from seeds rather than clonally makes it harder to preserve the preferred mutants? I'm not enough of a biologist to say.
Jeff Connell
Jeff Connell
The skins. The skin of the grape is a fascinating, complicated ecosystem that gives much more to wine than the skin of the apple ever could to cider.What is it about grapes that makes their fermented juice so much more varied and interesting than cider?
originally posted by SFJoe:
I don't think that apples have been subject to the same degree of selection. Maybe the longer generation time makes it harder? Maybe propagation from seeds rather than clonally makes it harder to preserve the preferred mutants? I'm not enough of a biologist to say.
Apple cultivars are also propagated by cuttings, not by seed. As Michael Pollan makes clear in Botany of Desire, the apple genome is hypervariable such that plants grown from seeds bear little resemblance to their parents.
Mark Lipton
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Calling Ken Schramm!
Ken Schramm
Ken Schramm
Pollan's comments about hyper-variability are spot on, and most random cross pollination of apples leads to children (AKA: Pippins) commonly referred to as "spitters." It has only been relatively recently (in pomological terms) that variety-specific cross pollination - growing seedlings from hand-pollinated fruit - has been pursued with the interest of gaining intended advantages, still with a ridiculously high percentage of spitters. A big suspicion for me is that as such, a much larger percentage of the initial domesticated genome made high quality fermented product in Vitis vinifera than in Malus domestica.
A generational time advantage for grape breeding experimentation holds water. Both fruits need a decent period to produce true to form, but grapes do generally bear a little earlier. Many of the best apple varieties like russets and Northern spies, for example, don't bear reliably until they are quite old. Combine that with the lack of predictability WRT inheritance of any parental traits, and the cost:benefit ratio is not in apples' favor.
There is another way to sort this. Our goals in apple and grape breeding have been very different. Grapes are a fruit that have a very short shelf life as a fresh fruit, but which create a very stable, high quality, long-lived and valuable fermented beverage. Apples make a short-lived, drinkable-but-pleasant beverage, but have many uses as a fresh fruit, and a long shelf life - longer than any other fruit save perhaps pears. Those were really attractive traits to our ancestors. The propensity of breeders then was to select for grapes that made great wine, and apples that ate and stored well. Even now, the holy grails of apple breeders have been appearance and crispness. As I jabber, breeders are looking hard to find a sport of Honey Crisp that will store for eight months, despite the fact that there are dozens of varieties that taste way better.
I could only bring myself to cut down two of my seven trees, by the way. Sadly, Hudson's Golden Gem, Freyburg, Calville Blanc d'Hiver and a few others will have to be grafted back onto one of the remaining scaffolds, because they went away with the casualties. I did prune heavily to make more room for Egremont and Roxbury Russets, and they are loving the space.
A generational time advantage for grape breeding experimentation holds water. Both fruits need a decent period to produce true to form, but grapes do generally bear a little earlier. Many of the best apple varieties like russets and Northern spies, for example, don't bear reliably until they are quite old. Combine that with the lack of predictability WRT inheritance of any parental traits, and the cost:benefit ratio is not in apples' favor.
There is another way to sort this. Our goals in apple and grape breeding have been very different. Grapes are a fruit that have a very short shelf life as a fresh fruit, but which create a very stable, high quality, long-lived and valuable fermented beverage. Apples make a short-lived, drinkable-but-pleasant beverage, but have many uses as a fresh fruit, and a long shelf life - longer than any other fruit save perhaps pears. Those were really attractive traits to our ancestors. The propensity of breeders then was to select for grapes that made great wine, and apples that ate and stored well. Even now, the holy grails of apple breeders have been appearance and crispness. As I jabber, breeders are looking hard to find a sport of Honey Crisp that will store for eight months, despite the fact that there are dozens of varieties that taste way better.
I could only bring myself to cut down two of my seven trees, by the way. Sadly, Hudson's Golden Gem, Freyburg, Calville Blanc d'Hiver and a few others will have to be grafted back onto one of the remaining scaffolds, because they went away with the casualties. I did prune heavily to make more room for Egremont and Roxbury Russets, and they are loving the space.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
Thanks, Ken.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Thank you for this update. What are you going to do with the extra Roxbury Russets?originally posted by Ken Schramm:
I could only bring myself to cut down two of my seven trees, by the way. Sadly, Hudson's Golden Gem, Freyburg, Calville Blanc d'Hiver and a few others will have to be grafted back onto one of the remaining scaffolds, because they went away with the casualties. I did prune heavily to make more room for Egremont and Roxbury Russets, and they are loving the space.
Ken Schramm
Ken Schramm
I'll press them, ferment some of the juice and drink the rest. Come to think of it, I'll drink it all eventually.