I Am A Cider Drinker

Jon Gower

One’s Sincere Praise for Cider

Like my father before me I am a cider drinker, which sounds like a confession. It brings with it images of rubicund faces and straw chewing, which are true in my case, other than the straw. Unlike him I am the net bene ciary of the wave of cra cider-making that has swept over the land, from Anglesey to Monmouth. e names alone make a found poem, a liquid litany...Old Monty Oakey Cokey, Alpha Tango Foxwhelp, Riptide, Robin Goch. ere has been a mini Renaissance in small orchard planting, apple picking and old techniques for cider manufacture. It’s a reaction against the big conglomerates with their factory processes, much as cra ale has answered the blandness of Eurolager and big brewery all-of-a-sameness.

Part of the pleasure of enjoying these boutique ciders lies in the hunt. A few years ago I met a hyperknowledgeable man called Jim Saunders who was standing behind the information desk of the O a’s Dyke Visitor Centre in Knighton. I asked him if he knew where I could buy some Skyborry Cider. is is made by two brothers, Adam and Dani Davies who scour the orchardlands of the Welsh borders before bringing the harvest back to a shed behind their cottage. I can attest to the fact that every bottle of Skyborry Pommage, Waiting for the Miracle and Rural Method is delicious, but certainly not Golden Delicious. I also like the fact that Skyborry derives from the Welsh word for barn, ‘ysgubor,’ which is a perfect blurring for a border name, and an ambrosial cider to boot. Sadly there wasn’t a stockist in the town so Jim phoned Adam and he kindly o ered to bring some samples over in the morning. Unfortunately he was just a tad too late as I had to catch a train and ironically I saw his van crossing the railway bridge as I chugged out of town. But the Celtic gods must have seen this and taken pity because quite by chance a friend sent me a gi some weeks later, an assortment of Skyborry ciders, which washed away a pleasant evening.

is love of cider and apples may account for the most pretentious thing in our garden. Last year we planted what we like to call an orchard although it’s not really big enough to warrant the word. Nevertheless, we’ve planted a small range of Welsh apple types – and wait for it – arranged them as they would be found spatially on the map of Wales. So Pig Aderyn, a Carmarthenshire apple, is found slightly to the west of a variety called Swansea Bay. en in the north of the patch is the most special one, namely Afal Enlli, the Bardsey Apple. I remember when they discovered the single, stunted but salt-resistant specimen back in 2005, a remnant of the orchard in the island’s priory. I once worked on Enlli and le part of my heart there. And just to remain sentimental for a moment, in another part of our Cardi garden there’s a single, rare Denbighshire plum, commemorating the fact that I met my wife in Denbigh.

I’d o en thought what the pink and cream coloured Bardsey apple would taste like but certainly didn’t expect to ever taste a brimming glass of the juice, as happened one evening in Pembrokeshire, where a man had planted a whole grove of 50 trees. Maybe it was my imagination, but the juice had more than a hint of ‘sea-girt isle’ to it, as Shakespeare put it, a hint of iodine, seaweedy tang. Which got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a range of Welsh ciders using exclusively Welsh apple types? ere’d be Morgan Sweet, an apple once very popular in the south Wales coal elds, Twyn y Sheri , a Raglan specialty, the mild bittersweet Perthyre from Monmouth as well as Pen Caled, or hard head from Cardigan. I’m sure there are some dedicated cidermakers out there in the throes of precisely such juicy experiments. By way of encouragement let me place an advance order now. For the days are lengthening and the swallows are on the wing and writing, like haymaking, is very thirsty work.