The end of summer often comes in a rush. As August draws to a close the sense of Autumn around the corner is palpable in the morning dew and the little chill in the air. We are checking in on our Burlands orchard today - 6 rented acres of traditional orchard, hunched comfortably in the soft folds of the hillside above Compton Dando in Somerset.
Photo credit: Elliot Cole for TOAST
This is an exciting time of the year for us at Wilding Cider. We are as excited in anticipation as we are nervous in waiting for the 2024 crop of cider apples and perry pears to ripen on the trees. This will be our seventh harvest as full time cider makers, our previous life in restaurants feels a lifetime away and yet it feels as though we have only just started out in cider. In this business our thinking has shifted to the long term. We now think in cycles of 100 years (the life expectancy of an apple tree), 30 years (the time it takes for an apple tree to give you its best fruit) and 18 months (the time it takes to ferment and mature a quality tannic cider). Ahead of us is a lifetime of experiment, observation and toil.
As I walk between the trees I try to estimate how much fruit of each variety there will be this year and whether the crop will come early or late. There are seventeen varieties of cider apple and one perry pear growing here, while across all of our orchards we have thirty five varieties of cider apples. The trees are large, grown on big roots, and underneath, sheep graze the diverse pasture, including the odd windfall apple, as they enjoy their last few days in the orchard before they are moved to hill grazing above to ready the understory for harvest. They have done their job as well as ever. The grass and understory plants aren't just grazed but also trampled, leaving behind them a thick mat of trampled biomass which both feeds the soil microbiome and also keeps falling apples clean, away from the soil. We are always looking for the ripest apples possible, which means leaving them on the tree until they fall naturally, and so the orchard floor conditions are crucial - the landing must be soft and clean. Damaged or dirty apples can’t be used as they will introduce spoilage organisms into the juice and cause fermentation to go awry. For natural cider, as for natural wine, the quality and condition of the fruit is the absolute key in making a quality drink.
Photo credits: Joseph Horton
Orchards like these are a timeless sight. Though nowadays closely planted bush orchards are more common, the history of traditional orchards stretches back to the earliest farming - an unbroken thread of silvopasture which still offers one of the most biodiverse, sustainable and beautiful ways of growing food and drink, certainly the most sustainable alcoholic drink. Silvopasture brings together grassland and trees, recreating a forest edge/savannah ecosystem and the fantastic biodiversity that it contains with grasses and wild flowers, blossoming trees and dead wood, hedgerows and scrub. Traditional orchards can thus function as an ecosystem in their own right, which frees them from many of the interventions of modern farming. There is no need to mow, because sheep and cows can graze. There is no need to plough because the trees are able to outcompete the understory plants. There is no need to spray because we can choose disease resistant varieties or disperse less healthy varieties within a diverse orchard to lessen the impact of disease. The lack of machine use, the long grass and the grazing animals mean that the soil can function properly as a fully healthy soil with no need for regular intervention. Pest problems are controlled with remarkable effectiveness by our army of helpful predators. Birds, bats, lacewings, hoverflies, parasitic wasps, ladybirds, social wasps all work for us, all we need to do is work for them, providing large, well grown hedges, patches of nettles, wild flowers and long grass throughout the orchard. The best thing to do is usually to take a step back and watch.
We are pleased with the crop in the orchards this year. There is a lot of fruit but not over heavy, which bodes well for quality. It will be one of the biggest crops we have had and this year I hope we can make a bit more than our previous record. The last time we had this much we sold a portion of the crop, but now with some new tanks we should be able to turn almost all of it into cider. With the crop estimates in the notebook, I am enjoying just being here, hearing the sounds of the place and soaking in the peace. I know that in a month's time the sounds will be of apples landing with a soft thud, the smell will be a heady fug of ripe apples, turning leaves, wet grass and mushrooms. I also know that in that intoxicating atmosphere there will be little time to sit and think. Once harvest starts the pressure is on to get the fruit at its peak, and the pace is relentless over nearly three months.
Photo credit: Joseph Horton
We pick all of our fruit by hand, from the orchard floor, and store it in crates or sacks to continue ripening - ‘sweating’ - before it is ready to press. You can usually tell when something is ready to press just from the smell, the aromas can take four or five weeks to develop properly after the apple falls from the tree and a big part of making quality cider is in observing these changes and getting the timing right of picking and pressing. Press too early and the tannins will not be fully ripe, press too late and the aroma is past its peak, and the fruit condition deteriorates meaning losing a portion at pressing time.
The ripe fruit is washed to remove orchard detritus - dust from the moss or lichens in the trees, blades of grass or leaves, little bits of bark dust, biodiverse orchards have plenty of detritus - and then milled, to create a pulp we call pomace. This frees the juice from the apple but before pressing we like to macerate the pomace overnight, which gently oxidises some of the tannins, draws out more anthocyanin and develops other flavours. When we press the pomace the following day, the juice will be deeper in colour and softer, richer, more mellow in the mouth. Our press is a rack and cloth press, a victorian development of the old straw presses of tradition and it gives great juice albeit in a labour intensive way. The juice is collected, measured for sugar and acidity and then transferred into stainless steel tanks for fermentation. We don’t add anything to the juice, which will ferment thanks to wild yeasts which exist everywhere - on the fruit, in the orchard and on the equipment in the cider house. Our main interventions are in blending different varieties together to balance the acid, tannin and aroma, and in racking the juice in the winter to retain sugars. The rest is careful observation, good fruit and cleaning. Lots of cleaning.
Photo credit: Elliot Cole for TOAST
While out in the orchards winters are busy pruning and replanting, winters in the cider house are slow and quiet. Fermentations of our style of cider are very long and very slow. Nothing happens in a rush which is a pace I enjoy, but it does mean an extended period of time, over half of the year, spent monitoring active fermentations. This is in real contrast to wine where fermentation is rapid, usually over in a couple of weeks. Our process is a weekly check in to see the speed of fermentation, to taste and smell whether anything is going amiss. We also consult the temperature, weather forecast and moon phases to time the racking right - ideally we want cold weather, high pressure and a new moon, but the temperature is by far the most important influence. Many of our ciders are bone dry and fully fermented, but with the racking what we are trying to achieve is some cider or perry with residual sugar, naturally sweet or medium. This is what we call the Rural Method, otherwise known as Cold Racking. By racking the cider into a clean tank, you leave behind the yeast sediment in the old tank, reducing the population of yeast and also the yeast nutrients, amino acids which are crucial for their reproduction. Each racking reduces the fermentation potential until, if all goes well, you are left with a clear cider in the spring, with a tiny yeast population, fermenting extremely slowly. By bottling in a heavy weight bottle you can capture the last little bit of fermentation in the bottle, giving a very gently sparkle. The last little bit of pressure and dissolved CO2 will kill the remaining yeasts and in so doing we eliminate the use of filtration, fining, sulphites, sugar, pasteurisation or any of the other means to stabilise or sweeten a drink.
We are now back from our tour of the orchards, and beginning to collate the crop estimates into a harvest plan. We think about the blends we want to recreate, the new things to try, what size tank of each thing is going to be possible. A whole year’s income will depend on how well we can translate the gift of these orchards into finished bottles of cider. I know the weather will be bad, I know our backs are going to ache and I know we will finish it exhausted. I can’t wait.
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