Cider Made Simple: All About Your New Favorite Drink (2015)

There is no reason in the world that I can think of for why the terrain should change noticeably at the Vermont/Quebec border, but it does. I have driven all over New England, from Providence up to Maine and over to Burlington, and the landscape looks much the same. The hills roll with rounded green slopes that burst open occasionally to expose outcroppings and walls of blocky pale granite. Open, deciduous forests fill the valleys, and nestled among them are frequent “sugar houses” where the famous maple syrup is made. Except for Boston and a few of the region’s smaller cities, New England is very rural and, on the eastern side of the Green Mountains of Vermont, largely free of humans. Two highways run north-south on either side of the mountains, and the day I drove north from Hanover, New Hampshire, I encountered exactly nine cars before I reached the Canadian border. Along the way, the hills undulated, and I listened to a report from the local radio station on black bears. When I arrived at the international border, I was the only car in sight.

Once you pass into La Belle Province, however, the land flattens out. The trees become sparse or absent, and the sky seems to grow large, like Montana’s. If you happen to be traveling around the countryside at the right time of year—November to January—you might chance upon a strange sight. There are certain species of apple trees in this region that don’t release their fruit when the frost comes. The leaves they shed unsentimentally, but the branches clutch their apples—large, deep red spheres—which dangle like Christmas ornaments placed on the naked limbs of the wrong trees. As recently as twenty years ago, locals didn’t pay a lot of attention to this odd phenomenon, until a man named Christian Barthomeuf had an idea.

Quebec’s Cidre de Glace

They come in tall, narrow, clear-glass bottles, and they pour out like syrup. Forged from cold, these strange ciders are as unusual in flavor as appearance. During the long winter, cold concentrates the juice, and likewise the flavors, which explode on the tongue in vivid expressions of baked apple, icy shafts of tartness, and decadent layers of caramel sweetness. Ice ciders, or cidre de glace, are a surprisingly recent invention, a riff on the eisweins made by Quebecois just across the border from Vermont and New York. In less than two decades, they have become popular enough to support dozens of makers, and they are slowly entering the consciousness of drinkers unused to finding a new star in the cider universe.

Barthomeuf, a native of France who moved to Quebec in the 1970s, had been a struggling vintner. By the late 1980s, he was taking advantage of the most obvious feature of Quebec’s terroir—its brutal winters—and making ice wines. At about the same time, he saw those strange apples in a neighbor’s orchard and wondered if he could make an ice wine from apples. He conducted his early experiments on a noncommercial scale—he was a vintner, not an orchardist—but the results were promising. Those early experiments convinced him to postpone wine, and he began collaborating with cider-makers to produce the first commercial products. In 2002, he started his own cidery and winery (he still makes ice wines) called Clos Saragnat.

Ice wines were almost certainly discovered by accident, and the most common account dates to 1794. An early freeze snuck up on the winemakers of Franconia in Germany and turned their crop into beautiful little ice cubes. It’s often described as a “frost,” but it must have been more severe than that. The crop had to have been frozen solid, so much that the winemakers, out of desperation, decided to press the grapes as they were. Much of the liquid had turned to ice inside the grape; what trickled out of the press was a concentrated juice, the sugary liquid being more resistant to solid states. When fermented, it produced a heavy, rich wine prized for its intensity. The reason no one really remembers the origins of eiswein has to do with the climate of Germany. Early freezes were rare. Quebec, by contrast, is blessed with them and is, as a consequence, now the largest producer of ice wines. It is no wonder Canadians invented ice cider.

I was really keen to speak to M. Barthomeuf. When you write about fermented beverages, it is rare to have the chance to meet an actual inventor. The first cider-maker was dead before Christ was born. Even creators of modern devices like lightbulbs, cars, and telephones are long gone. Here was a living part of history, and I wanted to hear about the birth of the newest cider. I couldn’t contact him before visiting Quebec, but I wasn’t too worried—the website lists the dates and times the cidery is open to visitors. I had managed to schedule a tour with another pioneer of ice cider, Christian’s first collaborator, François Pouliot, and I thought that would round out the historical lineage.

It was not to be. I dropped in one blustery late morning, as icy rain rattled on my windshield. It was early November, and as I pulled into Clos Saragnat’s long driveway, I found myself circling one of the famous trees. It was laden with apples, but about half the leaves were gone—some fluttering down as I snapped pictures. Clos Saragnat is a beautiful cidery, and through an attractive little window, I spied sleek bottles of cider sitting on the counter. But the sign on the door said fermé (closed), and neither rapping vigorously at the door or sitting in my car another 45 minutes did me any good. There are plenty of articles detailing Barthomeuf’s history, but I left Quebec without ever getting to experience his renowned ice ciders.

Fortunately, there are now dozens of Christian’s artistic progeny in the area, and I learned the secrets of wintery cider making from François Pouliot, owner of La Face Cachée de la Pomme in Hemmingford, Quebec, as well as Eleanor Leger, who gave me an unscheduled tour of Eden Ice Cider on the American side of the border.

“Cooked” by Freezing

There are two ways to make ice cider, and the results are slightly different. The first way is the most romantic, which is also to say the most difficult. This is the method of collecting frozen fruit off trees and pressing during the darkest, iciest depths of winter. It is therefore the one least practiced. (Cider-makers use the fussy term “cryo-extraction,” borrowed from ice-wine making, to describe it.) A much more common way is to press the fruit after harvest as you would any juice and then freeze that, rather than the apples. (It’s given the equally fussy name “cryo-concentration.”) The former is broadly considered to be the purest expression of ice cider, and it’s the one Quebecois would like you to envision. (On travel sites and in cidery brochures, pictures of snow-topped apples are ubiquitous.) Only a small portion of the total ice-cider production is made this way, but it’s hard to ignore its exotic allure.

When it’s hanging on a tree, the apple is subject to severe conditions. The temperature dips, and the apple freezes. Ice crystals form and rupture the flesh of the fruit. The temperature rises and the apple thaws. Up and down the temperature goes, and inside the apple, the juice separates out. Pure water forms as ice in the center, and the sticky, heavy juice is forced outward toward the skin. When I arrived at La Face Cachée de la Pomme (literally “the hidden face of the apple”), François Pouliot was still engaged with a previous visitor, so an assistant gave me a tour of the cidery. She described what happens to the apple this way. “Because it’s very sweet around in the flesh, it will stay a little bit soft. You can go into the orchard in January and bite into the apple. It’s soft, very sweet. The taste of it when you bite into it is like a cooked apple coming out of the oven because it’s cooked by the cold. The apple is a little bit brown, and soft, and crinkled.”

The process is much harsher for the apple than for juice, and it creates unique compounds. I had visited the tasting room at Cidrerie Du Minot, just down the road from La Face Cachée in Hemmingford, the afternoon before I arrived, and my notes described it as “funky, musty, degraded, almost musky.” When I got a chance to speak with François, he knew exactly the aroma I was describing. “Wild mushroom,” he said, smiling. “When I first went to present it in France, this is what came out of the tasting. The customers were coming to taste, and they were referring to it as ‘mushroom.’ Here in North America you will never compare a wine to a mushroom because it’s like an insult. But that’s what it is. It’s been twelve years, and I can’t get it out of my mind.” In his words, “It really gets more into the exotic fruit, rich—lychee, dry fig, apricot, banana. It’s so exotic you can’t even tell it’s made from an apple.”

François also intended to make wine before encountering ice cider. Indeed, he had already planted some vineyards, but lost the land on which they grew. While looking for a new piece of land, he found one with orchards and reasoned it would be good for grapes, too. But this is when he discovered the strange behavior of the winter fruit. His neighbor directed him to another farm where there were odd trees that didn’t shed their bounty and he went to see them for himself. “So I went to see her around December and I said, ‘Hello, Madame, I am Mister Pouliot. Would you mind if I go taste your apple?’ She said, ‘Are you crazy?’” The experience convinced him, though, and he leased her apples. There were only three varieties that produced winter fruit, and he took wood from those and grafted them back onto his own trees.

Since then, he has learned more about which varieties are best for freezing. Cortland apples will stay on the tree, but don’t age well—the juice they produce isn’t good for ice cider. The first orchard François visited had once been owned by a university that had made different hybrids, and one of those trees produced excellent winter-harvest fruit. François could find no name associated with the tree, so he named the apples that came off of it MacMillan and—of course—Pouliot. By this time, Christian Barthomeuf was selling small quantities of his own cider as cidre doux—“sweet cider,” a term already used by the French for their very different keeved ciders. Together, Pouliot and Barthomeuf worked to produce the first commercial ice cider at La Face Cachée in 1994, which François re-christened cidre de glace.

The cidery at La Face Cachée is an award-winning structure built next to the 1842 stone home. Out front is a dense thicket of low-slung trees, and the lane winds through them on the way to the house. Since the industrial space was purpose-built for cider making, it has covered spaces that are uninsulated from the cold where apples can be pressed and juice frozen. Other areas are insulated, including a large room filled with bottles of slowly carbonating sparkling cider made in the French méthode champenoise. But this is just a side project. La Face Cachée is one of the two largest ice-cider producers, and François, whose ice ciders have accompanied meals at the White House, would like it to be recognized as one of the great (if recent) traditions in cider making.

“All the approaches we have,” he said “we treat it as a wine.”

Refrigeration Prohibited

Eden Ice Cider is located on a latitude just ten miles south of Clos Saragnat, and yet it is in a very key way on the wrong side of the tracks. The national border that separates the two cideries also separates Eden from a legal definition that protects ice cider in Quebec (not an appellation, but in the ballpark) as well as the national identity attached to cidre de glace. But even more important, there’s a psychological line separating the countries. When I was sampling cider at Minot, the server was shocked that they had the climate to make ice cider in Vermont. “It’s not cold enough, is it?” In the imagination of Canadians, cidre de glace can only be made in the snow and frost of their home country.

Americans, however, think of Vermont as plenty icy. Eden snuggles up to the border, close enough that as I was getting out of my car, I received a text message from AT&T welcoming me to Canada (new roaming rates apply!). The Eden cidery is on the farm of Albert and Eleanor Leger, an address in “West Charleston”—a town that doesn’t seem to exist. (In rural England, addresses don’t include streets or numbers; in the United States, they apparently sometimes include phantom towns.) Getting there takes you past Lake Willoughby, a spectacular, 300-foot glacier lake the color of clear winter sky, and you know you’re getting close when you start passing orchards. The Legers founded the company in 2007 after a trip earlier to—where else?—Quebec. They wondered why no one was making ice cider in the States and decided to shoulder the responsibility themselves.

The Legers have been busy planting trees, originally in thirty-two varieties, but relying mainly on twelve. The bulk of their fruit, at least until their own trees mature, comes from other orchards, though. They have not made an emphasis of growing trees that produce winter apples, and instead press and freeze the juice. Eleanor was more concerned with the flavors of the different varieties, rather than their predilection for clinging to frozen branches. They actually experimented by storing the fruit until it froze, trying to replicate the process of cryo-extraction, but didn’t like the results. “We got decomposition happening,” she explained. “When you think about what happens when you freeze a lettuce leaf in your refrigerator-freezer? It doesn’t come back.”

Quebec, like New England, is an old apple-growing region, but the fruit was grown for eating. Some cultivars have acidity, especially the wild varieties, but the fruit was never planted to make cider. Eden does use old American and English cider varieties—Roxbury Russet, Ashmead’s Kernel, St. Edmund’s Russet, Esopus Spitzenburg—though mainly sharps, not varieties with high tannins. A key to a successful ice cider (on both sides of the border) is acidity. When the juice freezes, it concentrates not only the cider’s sweetness, but its tartness. “It’s all about balance,” Eleanor said. “What’s made ours successful is the balance.”

The process sounds easy enough. Once they juice the apples, Eden puts them in cube-shaped plastic containers and stacks them on a concrete slab outside. This was a surprise to me—it seemed like artificial freezing would be more efficient. Eleanor corrected me. “You get a much more intense concentrate than if you were to put it in a commercial freezer; the juice is stuck in the matrix of the water. Even if you melt it, you don’t get the yield and you don’t get the concentrate.” In this way, it’s much the same as the process of freezing apples on the stem—with a natural climate, you get temperature variations, freezing, thawing, and eventually the concentrate comes to the bottom of the container through gravity. I would later learn that freezing the cider artificially is actually against the rules in Quebec—it must be done by Mother Nature.

Albert is a chemist, and through trial and error, they discovered that when it’s 22°F [-6°C] inside the cube, “the stuff that’s liquid—and there is stuff that’s liquid at that temperature—is the right sugar level we’re looking for.”

Let’s stop for a moment and consider that “stuff that’s liquid.” When a cider-maker presses an apple in the regular fashion, what trickles out is a liquid with a “brix” of about 12 percent sugar (brix is the measurement of sugar in a liquid solution). Eden subscribes to the Quebec rules governing ice cider, and they specify that the concentrated juice must have a minimum of 30 percent sugar. “It’s a very cold, sticky job.”

In fermented beverages, the amount of available sugar corresponds to the potential alcohol strength—but only to a point. The juice ice cideries start with is so sugary that the yeasts can’t convert it all. Eden uses a Riesling strain and ferment at the warmish temperatures of 55 to 60°F [13 to 16°C]. They might be able to ferment it as strong as 14 percent or so before the environment became too alcoholic for the yeast to live, but they stop it at 10 percent, which is fairly typical for an ice cider. They drop the temperature back down to 35°F [2°C] and rack it twice, and all the yeast falls out. What they’re left with at that point is a solution that still has a residual sugar of 19 percent—about 50 percent more sweet than regular apple juice. If they could somehow separate the alcohol from the unfermented juice, Eden would have enough sugar left to make a very strong cider.

According to François Pouliot, it takes eighty apples to make one 375-ml bottle of ice cider. The process takes months, or sometimes years, and requires a climate that has extended temperatures well below freezing. It is not a product for mass production—or mass consumption, for that matter. To accentuate this point, cider-makers have taken to using the bottles of ice wines—tall and narrow. One pours ice cider into cordials and sips them slowly, contemplatively. “It’s not something you drink every day,” said Eleanor. “It’s for special occasions.”

At the moment, if you live in a large city, you might find a bottle from Eden, La Face Cachée de la Pomme, or Pinnacle, but only if the gods of cider smile upon you. More likely, you’ll only find them in their home region. The supply is low, and few Canadian companies export to the United States.

I brought back bottles from La Face Cachée de la Pomme and Cidrerie Du Minot (fortunately Eden can be found in Oregon) and shared them with some local cider-makers and cider fans. They were all impressed and intrigued. Ice ciders have flavors and characteristics present nowhere else in the cider world.

This is how, in the two short decades of their lives, cidres de glace have established themselves as a regional specialty. We can’t speak of national tradition (perhaps the trends will turn against them), but there’s every reason to believe that more and more producers will emerge and more of this rare and extraordinary beverage will make it to the tables of regular folk. In the coming decades, cider-makers will learn more about the best apples and methods to make these beverages. It’s not every day we get to see the birth of a new tradition, and there’s every reason to think that’s what’s happening in the flat, big-sky country of southern Quebec.