Apple juice runs through our veins
Sue Quinn meets the brothers who have made cider drinking socially acceptable
Henry Chevallier Guild spent his wedding night in a tent in his apple orchard – an odd place to kick-off married life for almost anyone but him. As eighth-generation cider makers, Henry and his brother Barry have apple juice in their DNA. The pair run Aspall, the cider and vinegar company that dates back to 1728, when their forefathers arrived from Jersey and planted the first apple trees on the 280-acre Suffolk estate. Aspall Hall, home to Barry, his wife and two children, still boasts the stone trough and wheel Clement Chevallier shipped over from Normandy to crush apples almost 300 years ago. Henry and Barry soon followed the family trade, helping their parents pick apples as toddlers and working on the bottling line as teenagers in the holidays. Now, they sit atop a multi-million pound empire that is riding the crest of a premium cider boom – and rightly so. The brothers believe that cider has long been misunderstood. As they take me on a tour of the Aspall estate, they argue that cider can be just as sophisticated and versatile as wine, as long as it’s high quality and made with passion. “The soul of the business is about making sure we never step away from our core values in terms of quality of the ingredients and the human input. It will never be a case of just pushing a button,” says Henry. The brothers are strikingly different. Henry, 45, has been described as an upper-crust hippy, and is the more creative of the two. Barry, 47, is charming and equally enthused (especially on the subject of his heritage) but more reserved and processdriven than his brother. Their differences work well in business because they know each other so well, according to Barry. “There are only 18 months between us in age,” he says. “When our parents were growing the business, Mum would make us breakfast in the morning and say, ‘Lunch is at one o’clock, see you then.’ So we would just disappear down to the orchards and muck around. We didn’t have a social life like some of our friends because our parents were working, so we hung out together an awful lot.” Their parents handed over the reins in 1996, and early on the brothers realised they needed to adapt the business from one that mainly supplied apple juice and vinegar to supermarket labels, to establishing the Aspall brand. “We knew that if we just carried on doing what we were doing we would lose the supermarket business because at some point they would buy it cheaper elsewhere,” Barry says. “So we decided to produce our own brand. And Henry was always interested in making cider, so he worked on developing the recipes.” Henry had spotted what would prove to be a buoyant segment of an otherwise downbeat alcohol market. But the learning curve was steep. One supermarket buyer “almost fell of his chair laughing” when Henry told him the price he wanted for his cider – more than twice what other suppliers were paid. But convinced that discerning drinkers would pay a premium for a quality product, the brothers pushed on. By 2003 Aspall “cyder” was being stocked in supermarkets and served in pubs around Britain. Then, in 2006, Magners revolutionised