THREE COUNTIES PERRIES

The 16th Century kitchen accounts of the Manor House in Elmley Castle, Gloucestershire, are obsessive in their detail and list all the food and drink consumed. So we have a pretty good idea of the bill of fare when Elizabeth I stopped by on her royal progress. The house party got through a very creditable amount of wine, ale and cider, but it was perry that caught the Queen’s fancy. When she returned to court she wrote demanding a special delivery of perry and, so the tale goes, graciously suggested that three perry pears be added to the Worcester City coat of arms.

Perry (the increasing use of the term ‘pear cider’ is irritating and just plain wrong) is one of the great glories of the English countryside. To a chemist the humblest perry pear is much more complex than any cider apple and they deliver a much greater variation in taste profiles. This is all due to the high levels of obscure tannins – tannins from which expert perry makers coax an astonishing depth of flavour.

The process starts when the crushed pears are left to macerate in their own juice (over time, tannin levels can reduce by two thirds, presumably the same mechanism is at work here as when making Muscadet sur lie). By comparison cider makers have it easy, and that goes for the apple picking too. Commercial cider apples are grown in neat orchards of sensibly short trees so picking is a manageable, mechanical exercise. But there are hardly any perry orchards left, and the few perry pear trees remaining are often standard trees over 100 years old.

This means the ripe pears may be over 80 feet above the ground, so gathering them can be a tricky business and pickers need to be armed with ‘panking poles’ or ‘love hooks’ – 12ft poles with a crook at the end to shift the pears from the upper branches of these aged trees. What’s more, this situation is unlikely to change in a hurry, as perry pear trees take 30 years to fruit well and need to be old before they start to bear a large crop. There is even a countryman’s adage to that effect: “Plant pears for your heirs.”

Perversely, this old-fashioned, traditional drink was at the heart of one of the great post-war marketing success stories, when a family of Somerset farmers, the Showerings, made their fortune with Babycham, a drink which originally had the strap-line “the genuine champagne perry”. This was the focus for a long running lawsuit with the Champagne producers who eventually banished the French word from the Babycham label. Against all expectations, perry has come good for the Showerings a second time – they launched Brothers Pear Cider at the Glastonbury Festival and look like having another perry success on their hands.

In a complex application, the Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire Cider and Perry Makers Association has managed to secure PGI status for each county’s cider and each county’s perry. The producers are a goahead bunch and have also set up the Three Counties Perry Presidium under the aegis of the Slow Food movement. The Presidium aims to raise awareness of perry, safeguard biodiversity and conserve the old perry pear varieties, and maintain, protect and enhance the skills involved in the production and marketing of perry.

Kevin Minchew is a traditional cider and perry maker who lives and works in Gloucestershire. His perries are sophisticated, with a great depth of flavour and he has an on-going project to try to perfect a real Champagne-method perry. As he points out, as long ago as

1811 Thomas Andrew Knight wrote: “The Teinton Squash perry has, I believe, been often sold for Champagne, which it resembles a good deal in colour and briskness.”

Minchew’s holy grail is to make a single variety, method Champenoise perry. As he says: “In Gloucestershire we were making a bottle-conditioned, fizzy perry in the early 18th Century well before Dom Perignon ever put a cork into a bottle.” w: www.threecountiesperry.co.uk

And that sums up the enigma of perry – a drink that is both simple and sophisticated. The fact that perry pear trees are few and far between means true perry will always be a minority product when viewed alongside the huge, industrial business that cider has become. As a specialist, high quality artisan drink, perry is made in small quantities for a knowledgeable local market, making it exactly the kind of product that deserves both a wider audience and the protection of the PGI system.

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