The champagne of ciders

Nothing can be more magical than letting a genie out of a bottle. It’s an odd phrase that does of course have a flip-side – you can never get the genie to go back into the bottle. But even taking that into consideration, the idea of a bottled genie seems to wholly suit what is arguably the most exciting revolution going on in the world of Westcountry food and drink today.

I refer to the new bottle-fermented ciders which are beginning to appear here and there across the rural

Westcountry map.

The genie analogy is fitting because something truly magical does happen when you use certain clever, centuries-old, techniques to turn apple juice into an alcoholic drink inside a bottle.

Do it right and what you get is a product that is similar to good champagne. The liquid will be clear and sparkling and astonishingly refreshing. The bubbles hitting your tongue will be small and smooth, without any of the harshness you get with a drink that has been artificially carbonated.

And the flavour… well, once again, if the process has been completed in just the right way the complexities of flavour you’ll experience from a bottle-fermented cider will leave you delighted and fascinated in exactly the same way as they would if you’d sipped a Grande Marque champagne costing £400 a bottle. If you think that is an exaggeration then I can report that deep in the Blackdown Hills this week I sampled a food and drink pairing which was probably the finest marriage of solid and liquid ever to pass my lips.

Alex Hill, one of the UK’s leading experts on bottle-fermented cider, had poured a glass of his Bollhayes 2003 and also cut a slice of the best Iberico ham money can buy. It was as if someone had taken the classic combo of Sunday roast pork and apple sauce, and distilled them down to create two little phials containing essences of the real thing that were somehow 500 times more concentrated and alive and exciting. The needle on the patent Hesp Wowometer, which sits deep within the pleasure cortex of my brain, went straight into the red.

It was the kind of fabulous combination that I could imagine a multi-millionaire paying ludicrous amounts of money for in a top Michelin restaurant. This was epicurean pleasure raised to its very highest setting.

All I can do is quote from Alex’s tasting notes which describe the 2003 Bollhayes thus: “Deep amber with fine bubbles. Aroma: Complex, deep, rich, with a hint of smoky vanilla, plum and burnt sugar. Flavour: Richly bitter, with notes of juniper and burnt sugar.”

Two mentions of sugar there, but one of the magical things about this particular kind of genie in a bottle is that there is either no added sugar, or just a tiny amount. And no other kind of artificial ingredient, I have to add, save in this case maybe a smidgen of champagne yeast. What you are getting with a bottle-fermented cider is apple juice that has been left to work a magic of its own. It is a magic that elevates it from everyday cider in the same way as a bottle of Krug is placed far above a wine-box of cheap supermarket plonk. But when I say “work a magic of its own”, bottle-fermented cider does need a helping hand. Indeed, it requires a great deal of attention and care, which is why the proper stuff will never be cheap.

After having lunch with Alex and sampling a couple of his Bollhayes products, cider-expert James Crowden and I drove 20 miles deeper into Devon to meet a young couple whose bottle-fermented ciders can cost more than £50 a pop in top Michelin-starred London restaurants. And why not? The champagne equivalent could cost way over ten times that in such establishments.

Polly Hilton and husband Matt run Find and Foster, a small bottle-fermented cider company named after the fact that Polly started out by finding rundown orchards in the rural hinterland north of Exeter and began bringing them back to life.

In a way James and I managed to visit both ends of this new cider revolution in that Alex has been in this particular game for longer than most other cider-makers in the UK (we even sampled a bottle of his truly amazing 1993 vintage) – while Polly and Matt are newcomers who happen to have already gained an impressive track record.

For many years Alex owned and ran a Devon-based business called Vigo which sells and designs equipment needed by cider-makers – but long before his retirement he was drawn to the idea of a bottle-fermented version of the drink.

And, as I keep saying, it’s one that works by a kind of alchemy. A two-sided alchemy, as far as I can make out. Bottle-fermenting is a complex process. Basically you can go down one of two routes: the methode-champenoise system (as followed by Alex) or an ancient process known as “keeving” (which is often, but not always, practised by Polly and Matt).

As we walked into Alex’s cider-shed we heard the familiar bubbling sound familiar to amateur wine-makers who have air-locks on their demijohns.

“The music of fermentation” is what Alex called the sound as we gazed at the big steel vats full of rapidly fermenting apple juice.

“Once it’s finished fermenting you don’t want air-contact because nearly all the spoilage organisms which can ruin cider rely on oxygen,” Alex explained. “If you can eliminate oxygen the cider has a better chance of tasting good. Traditional cider tasted pretty rough sometimes because people didn’t follow that simple rule.

“This is fermenting with wild yeasts. This is just pure apple juice with nothing added – the yeast is in the apples, in the air, in

Food editor Martin Hesp fizzes with excitement about cider that’s fermented in its bottle This is just pure apple juice with nothing added – the yeast is in the apples