Old Drink Has New Sparkle

Add ice for instant smartness. By Felicity Carter.

MARTINIS go in and out of fashion. Rum cocktails are regularly reinvented. Even rose is back in the fridge. But the craze for cider thats been sweeping Britain and Europe has to be the unlikeliest comeback of them all.

Long the choice of underage drinkers who like its fizzy sweetness, cider has been shunned by everybody else since the 1970s. But in 2006 some clever person at Irish brewer Bulmers hit on the idea of promoting cider served on ice. The response must have been beyond its wildest dreams, because cider has been the must-have summer drink since - and the phenomenon is coming this way.

"Its starting to catch on here," says Adam Marks, of Bress Winery in Harcourt, Victorias apple capital. "The drinkers were getting are those who had a good experience in the UK and from those who have been to Normandy. Our production is 500 cases a year and Im worried that may not be enough."

Drew Henry, of Henry of Harcourts, is seeing the same thing. "Its being driven out of Ireland but its increasing demand for our cider."

The challenge, they believe, will be to convince people that not all ciders are alike. Marks says commercial brands are made from carbonated juice concentrate, while hand-made ciders are made in different styles from apples and, sometimes, pears and usually have lower alcohol levels.

"We get the apples, generally straight out of the orchard, crush them to a fine pulp, press the juice out and from there on in its basic winemaking," agrees Henry.

Like winemakers, cider makers must balance sweetness and acidity, so can use a range of apples. The base may include juice from traditional cider apples such as the bittersweet Kingston Black and Bulmers Norman, or an eating apple such as Pink Lady.

There are also centuries of European traditions to draw upon.

English cider is often made with ale yeasts and is usually still, while French ciders are sparkling, often having undergone a Champagne-style secondary fermentation in the bottle.

When Marks was deciding which style of cider to make, for example, he tasted his way through ciders from both traditions, before plumping for the more textured Normandy style.

Today, he makes two sparkling ciders, one dry and one sweeter, and says aged cider easily matches fine wine for complexity and depth of flavour.

Winemaker Philip Kelly at Kellybrook winery in the Yarra Valley takes a different approach. Kellybrook has produced ciders since 1969, including both a sparkling French style, and an "old gold", still English style. Now it is making a draught cider. "The markets definitely asking for it," Kelly says. "Youd call it a premium cider made from freshly pressed local fruit but doing it in a format thats on draught and in small format bottles.

"Its very easy to sell and a good stepping stone into real cider from the massive mainstream stuff."

If the trend continues, it could revive Australias cider heritage. Tony Thorogood, one of Australias most respected cider makers, says cider goes back to colonial days.

"There were cider gardens outside Melbourne in the 1960s, where people would stop and drink on Sunday afternoons," he says. "But with mergers and takeovers, the older cider makers just got absorbed."

Thorogoods not Victorian but from South Australia. Nor is he a winemaker, saying winemakers laughed at him when he opened his cider house 10 years ago. But he is a treasury of knowledge, as youd expect from someone who has been on an overseas cider study tour, thanks to a Churchill Fellowship.

Thorogood says Australians have a whole new culinary experience ahead of them. "In Australia, cider is considered apple juice, or a pub drink, which is a very thin idea of what cider is," he explains.

"In the rest of the world, it has a big association with food. In England it can come down to a hunk of cheddar and thick sliced onions, while in Brittany its savoury pancakes. In some places its seafood."

Thorogood can think of another reason we will soon see more cider in the bottleshops: the state of the wine industry.

"Where winemakers would try and put us down, we now have winemakers ring us up. They basically want to get in on the act."

Does this mean we now have to treat cider like wine, matching it to food, or can we just pour it over ice like everybody else?

"In Australia it will work beautifully in summer," Thorogood says. "A lot of people here drink red wine, which is a dreadful drink for 40 degrees. Cider on the rocks will be a wonderful thing."

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