Cider Made Simple: All About Your New Favorite Drink (2015)
The ordinary apple you buy year-round at the grocery store comes from a tree known as Malus domestica, a member of the rose family. It is a versatile tree and can be grown in nearly any climate, and indeed is cultivated most places on Earth. The domestic cultivar is a descendant of a much older fruit, 4.5 million years in the making, and a part of the human diet for at least 8,500 years. Any plant that old and well-traveled will have a mixed genome, and the apple has a couple of major ancestors. One branch of the family goes back to the European crab apple (Malus sylvestris), which might surprise anyone who has encountered that walnut-size, sour fruit. It has long been a staple of wild pigs, not humans.
Another branch of the family, however, produces apples like we know them—large, round, and sweet. These are Malus sieversii, and the trees grow up to 50 feet [15 meters] tall, laden with fruit. Ground zero is the Kazakh city of Almaty, just north of Kyrgyzstan, west of China, and a six-hour flight from the nearest European crab. Just outside Almaty, in the foothills of the towering Tian Shan mountains, are ancient stands of pear, apricot, and apple trees. They form dense forests in those hills—the only place on Earth where that happens—so lush that in the fall, fruit forms an intoxicating carpet on the forest floor. For nearly a hundred years, botanists have suspected these to be the oldest apple trees in the world, and recent genomic studies suggest they are the closest relatives to Malus domestica. Researchers have studied the trees in those forests, identifying more than two dozen distinct varieties that can be considered wholly wild, and another two or three dozen that are natural, ancient hybrids of these originals. Travelers to these woods, inhaling the autumnal scents of ripe apples, have called it the Garden of Eden.
Almaty: “Father of Apples”
Before it was called Almaty, the city was known as Alma-Ata, which translates roughly into “father of apples.” Unfortunately, the modern city has doubled in population since the 1960s, filling up the valley once home to the earth’s first apples. Cultivated trees have been planted among the wild trees, which are dwindling, down nearly 80 percent over the same period. Botanists are busily trying to preserve the original wild species, and private groups as well as the United Nations are trying to protect remaining stands. It’s a tenuous moment for a critical botanical heritage.
Many wild trees are, like the crab apple, small and unpalatable. The apple tree spends a lot of energy making large, fleshy fruit—if it can tempt a creature to carry away a small, bitter offering, so much the better. In the forests of Kazakhstan, though, the trees are in vigorous competition; large, sweet fruit is the norm. Famous Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov visited in 1929, where he found the fruit “so superior in quality and size that they could be taken directly from [these forests] to market without anyone knowing the difference.” If the modern apple owes its genetic code to multiple sources, its soul was born high up in the Tian Shan mountains.
Kazakhstan may now seem peripheral to the hum of world events, but millennia ago it was on the way to everywhere. The forests near Almaty were along the ancient trade routes, and travelers helped themselves to the fruity buffet. In time, caravans deposited seeds of the wild fruits across Asia and Europe. Soon they were replanted intentionally, beginning domestication. Empires got into the act, spreading them farther and farther out. The Persians were the first to cultivate apple trees, and when Alexander the Great came through, he took apples back to Greece. Rome followed, and when the Romans spread north throughout Europe, they took apple trees with them, all the way to England.
Heterozygosity
There’s an important complication to this story—just one along the way to a nice glass of cider. It involves the way parents pass along traits to the next generation. In some cases, parents create exact copies of themselves. But in others, each offspring emerges after a spin of the genetic dial, looking more and sometimes very much less like its parents. This is the case with humans, of course, and also apples. If you plant a seed from a Fuji apple, the tree that sprouts from it will not produce Fujis. Geneticists call apples “heterozygous,” a technical term that refers to the way genes express themselves.
For the aspiring gardener in ancient Persia, this posed a challenge. How do you grow those apples you’ve fallen in love with? The answer came in a form of cloning called grafting, wherein that Persian would cut a budding stem from his favorite tree and insert it into a notch in another tree. This is the only way to reproduce the same fruit, and people have been practicing it for at least three thousand years. The Egyptians and Babylonians grafted, and Roman statesman and Latin prose writer Cato the Elder described it in De Agricultura. “Pears and apples may be grafted during the spring,” he wrote, “for fifty days at the time of the summer solstice.”
It’s a pretty remarkable process. When orchardists plant a new field of apples, they begin with a little twig no bigger than your thumb. This is a variety chosen for its strong roots and is in fact called “root stock.” It only needs to extend up a bit before the whole (tiny) trunk will be grafted to a shoot of similar diameter from the apple the orchardist wants to grow (called scion wood). In essence, when you look out over the orderly rows of an apple orchard, you’re seeing two varieties of apple trees, different at the top and bottom. Sometimes farmers want to swap out one variety of apple in an orchard for another. They don’t replant the trees, they just cut back the old variety and graft on the new one—a process that produces apples far quicker than planting new trees. In this way, apple varieties can continue along for hundreds of years.
On the other hand, the heterozygosity of apples means there have always been tons of different varieties to appeal to our palates. Even in the most well-kept gardens, apples tumble to the ground or are stolen by thieves who deposit their seeds any distance away. Sprouts inevitably arise, and some of them become mature trees and some of them—a small percentage, but think how many apple trees there are—produce wonderful, new varieties. This is how we got Newtown Pippins and Granny Smiths and Red Delicious apples—and in fact, a great many of the apples we now fastidiously cultivate. The ability to perfectly reproduce apple varieties on the one hand while having an infinite supply of potential new varieties on the other has helped make apples beloved by humans for millennia.
Applesauce into Juice
Let’s go back to the Romans. By the time they were planting apple trees in their gardens, humans had been snacking on the sweet delights for several thousand years. It seems almost inconceivable that humans wouldn’t have stumbled across the joys of cider by then, unless you consider one detail. Squash a grape and juice trickles out, ready to transform itself to wine. Squash an apple and you … have a squashed apple. There’s juice inside, but it gets trapped in the pulp, which looks more like applesauce when pressure is applied. To get juice, you need a grinder and press, technological innovations that were slow in coming.
The Romans, however, had both wonderful tech and also literacy and bureaucracy, which meant not only did they invent a workable press, but they wrote about it. In fact, they didn’t invent so much as adapt, repurposing olive presses to work with apples. These were enormous, unwieldy things that required lots of space and human-power to operate. One design was called a lever-press and functioned when a 40-ft [12-m] beam (!) was lowered onto a bed of pulp. Screw-presses, of a kind that are still in use in some European farmhouses, were also a Roman invention.
They Don’t Last Forever
Nature is dynamic. Creatures feed on plants and one another, and they adapt by developing greater resources for finding food or protecting against predators. Plants that propagate through cloning are at a disadvantage; eventually old varieties of apples begin to lose the battle against pests and blight. English orchardists watched this happen in the eighteenth century, as evolved predators began to overwhelm the old generation of cider apples. Many of the current cider apples date to that time, when orchardists were breeding for replacements. Twenty-first-century orchardists have more powerful tools at their disposal in fighting this war against evolution, but eventually, some of the classic apples are likely to become unproductive and be replaced by modern descendants.
That great chronicler of all things botanical, Pliny the Elder, mentioned that by the first century A.D., Romans were making all kinds of wines, including apple wine. (They also made perry from pears.) Since they already had these ship-length presses lying around, I guess it made sense to use them for something other than just olives. There is a bit of a debate about whether the Romans were the first to make cider—maybe they were just the first to write about it—but whatever the truth, cider dates back at least two thousand years.
Many things the Romans invented—aqueducts, toilets, paved roads—were not taken up with enthusiasm by later civilizations. Count cider among the abandoned. As the globe slid into the Dark Ages, cider seemed to vanish, remaining mostly hidden from view for the better part of a thousand years. If people were making cider, they mostly kept it to themselves. Fortunately, monks continued to cultivate apples and other crops at their quickly proliferating abbeys under Charlemagne in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. This was good, because it meant that when people started making cider again—and Charlemagne issued an edict encouraging them to do so—they had cultivated apples at hand. Written records of cider making start to appear again after this period, and cider has been refreshing us ever since.
Cider making re-emerged thereafter—most robustly in northern Spain—but remained a minor beverage compared to beer and wine. The latter was popular as far north as England, where grapes flourished until the climate permanently changed in the thirteenth century with the onset of a “mini ice age.” That’s when cider really came into its own (though admittedly, it was still less popular than beer and wine) and the famous cider regions in England, France, Spain, and Germany were established. The great orchards of Normandy, Herefordshire, and Asturias started spreading across the hillsides where once grapes had grown. Over the next few centuries, cider-makers refined their techniques and built better equipment, making more and more cider as they went. By the start of the seventeenth century, the English were planting apple trees in North America, starting a new continent on its love affair with apples and cider.
The Cider Coasts
If you pull out a map and look at the three classic cider-producing regions, you’ll see they have something in common. They all crowd next to a sea coast. England’s West Country, Normandy and Brittany in France, and the northern coast of Spain are all positioned on north or northwest coasts. Maritime climates provide a regular, gentle wash of rain throughout the year with moderate temperatures that never get too hot or too cold. Apples grow elsewhere, of course—many other places—but it’s interesting that these are not just apple regions, but cider apple regions.
Cider-makers that I spoke with don’t relate to the word terroir. That’s an oenophile’s concept and, indeed, one that may have more relevance in a drink where single grape varieties are more prized. And yet, good fruit of a particular kind is at the heart of cider, and the climates of these regions have much in common. Eating apples grow on the eastern half of the island of Great Britain, but they are mostly culinary varieties; the same is true of Germany, where eating apples have been turned into cider for centuries. What makes the coastal climates so conducive to the acidic and tannic fruit cider is known for?
If we compare the high and low temperatures of cities in this region, they all track to within a few degrees of each other. Spain is much more southerly than France and England, and during the growing season, high temperatures run 5 or 6°F warmer on average—but they are still a mild 77°F [25°C] even at their height in July. Because natural fermentation was critical to ciders until the twentieth century (and remains so among traditional cider-makers), winter temperatures are a part of this life cycle. It must be cold but not too cold—yeasts make great cider at about 45°F [7°C]. Low temperatures during the fermentation months of December through April are never more than 3°F different in Bristol, England; Lisieux, France; or Oviedo, Spain. All three regions get ample rain, ranging from 65 centimeters [251/2 inches] in Lisieux to 95 centimeters [371/2 inches] in Oviedo. In the United States, the pattern is repeating. The main cider regions are the Pacific Northwest, New England, Virginia, and Michigan. The weather of the Pacific Northwest is nearly identical to that of Normandy and Herefordshire. Virginia’s climate sees greater extremes, but has similar rainfall, and New England’s has yet greater extremes. Michigan is a bit of an outlier, though as cider-maker Greg Hall notes, the apple-growing region is along the west coast of Lake Michigan and has something of the maritime climate, too. (Wet, but temperatures similar to New England.)
We know that all these places grow great apple trees, but we know less about cider apples. Each region has climate different enough that it’s not clear which apples will flourish. Steve Wood, of New Hampshire’s Farnum Hill Ciders, says apple growing is “pretty specific expertise.” He related the story of a grower who moved from New York’s Hudson Valley to New Hampshire and found he couldn’t grow trees there. He didn’t know the ground, the climate. “I think I could grow apples in the Champlain Valley of Vermont in the clay or silt loam soils they’ve got there,” he says. “If I went to the Hudson Valley with the gravelly stuff they’ve got there, I would be lost.”
Much as happened in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries in what we now consider primo cider country, growers are experimenting with cider trees in Lebanon, New Hampshire; Dugspur, Virginia; Salem, Oregon; and Fennville, Michigan. There’s every reason to think these are great places for cider trees to flourish. But we’ll only know in a decade or three which of the trees produce good cider apples.
After a visit to EZ Orchards in Salem, Oregon, I received an e-mail from orchardist and cider-maker Kevin Zielinski. His family has been growing apples there for eighty-six years, but are only fifteen years into the cider apple experiment. He was ruminating on the pleasures and challenges of trying to figure out which apples would make good cider on his land. “It is indeed a complicated and evolving understanding of an age-old process,” he wrote. “The fact is that the fermentation of apples was pioneered by farmers, not academics.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “We have not yet quit the apple.”
Definitely not. The story of Malus domestica continues to add new chapters and the plot is getting thicker by the minute.