English Sparkling Cider - The Missing Link?

I enjoyed Henry Jeffreys' book Empire of Booze for a number of reasons, but perhaps mostly for two insights. Firstly how England and France are so intertwined in the history of traditional method sparkling wine. Secondly, and somewhat relatedly, the shared history of sparkling wine and one of my other favourite drinks: cider.

Much of this is also covered in Henry Jeffreys' article in the Spectator on the subject. The fact that some of the important innovations leading to the development of traditional method sparkling wine happened in England in the 17th Century (thanks to such Royal Society luminaries as Christopher Merret and Kenelm Digby), which also coincided with a crisis in wine supply here, meant that actually some of the early "R&D" was carried out on cider, rather than wine.

In 1669 Kenelm Digby's "The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight Opened" was published posthumously, Digby having died in 1665. This describes bottling of cider before the fermentation has completed to produce a sparkling drink - essentially the ancestral method, otherwise known today as the rather hip pet nat. A few years later, in 1672, Christopher Merret presented a paper to the Royal Society outlining secondary fermentation in the bottle - the key tenet of the traditional method of sparkling wine production. Both Merret and Digby were founding members of the Royal Society, and would have known each other. There is some debate over which of the two made the bigger contribution to the development of sparkling wine production - with other contributors including a third Royal Society member, John Beale (who presented the notion of dosage, applied to cider, as early as 1662), but it seems clear the Royal Society was a melting pot of ideas during this period. The advances of sparkling wine and cider were clearly intertwined, with many of the techniques developed being equally applicable to either drink.

In the decades which followed this feverish period of innovation in effervescent fermented fruit juice, due to continuing wine shortages in England, cider (and particularly sparkling cider) enjoyed something of a vogue as a premium product. Arguably this laid the foundation for the taste in sparkling wine among the aristocracy in England, which was ultimately destined to become the biggest export market for Champagne.

During the 18th and 19th Centuries wine regained its dominance among the English middle and upper classes, but in the 20th Century some attempts to reinstate sparkling cider (and perry) as a sophisticated drink were made. Starting in 1906 with Bulmer's "Pomagne" - originally made to the traditional method - and perhaps most famously from the 1950s with kitsch classic BabyCham.

A more recent revival started in the 1990s, when Gospel Green were the first of a wave of new producers to revive traditional method sparkling cider.

I have to admit, that although I love cider, I generally avoid the sparkling stuff. I like cider to be as simple, natural and rustic as possible. Most sparkling cider is made by an injection of CO2 and for me that feels like cheating - how many wine critics would take a sparkling wine seriously if produced that way? Not to mention that it loses a lot of the rustic earthy quality I like. An honourable mention should however be given here to some of the more earnest methods of adding effervescence to cider, such as keeving.

So for me the discovery of traditional method sparkling cider was an opportunity to revisit and re-evaluate ciders with fizz.

Gospel Green is a Sussex cider, and typical for a cider of the South East region uses dessert varieties of apples rather than the more specialised cider apple varieties found in the West Midlands. This generally makes for a cider which is a bit more approachable, albeit not always with the same depth of character you might find in some of the best that, say, Herefordshire has to offer. It's an elegant, refined cider, with well integrated bubbles (not that slightly jarring effect you get from injected CO2) and a very pleasant mouthfeel.

In many ways it has more in common with an English sparkling wine than most of the still English farmhouse ciders I tend to drink. Of course there's the effervescence, and the familiar texture of bubbles you only get from secondary fermentation in the bottle, but also the lack of tannins as a result of using dessert apples bring it a step closer to white wine territory, and some of those delicate apple notes on the nose could have been from a Chardonnay dominant ESW.

What I think I like about it most though is the historical perspective it offers, and that glimpse of a time when cider and wine were considered close cousins.