Melvyn Minnaar
If it’s apple you want to drink, go for it. There’s real, virgin apple juice, there’s fabulous, world-famous Appletiser, and then there is apple cider – the hottest, coolest drink in to-be-seen-in bars this summer.
The gentrification – or yuppiefication – of cider is a world-wide phenomenon. Winning more and more bright and breezy followers in places where apples would not normally pass the lips, it is taking local drinking holes by storm.
The problem is that not all the drinks posing as cider are really cider, in the proper sense of the word.
In times past, alcohol fermented from apples in a style similar to beer was a somewhat pleasant peasant beverage. Because apples flourished in certain areas of Normandy in France and in southern England, it was logical to turn it into a drink with a punch. (As we all know, one can turn just about any fruit into alcohol.) In the United States, traditional apple – and thus cider – territory is Pennsylvania.
True cider, originally produced from apples fondly known as Foxwhelp, Dabinett and Chisel Jersey, is a hearty, mouth-filling, often cloudy, sometimes bitter-apple drink for those with their hearts in the right place.
In our present new-age-beverage phase (pity poor Pepsi!), postmodern apple cider rarely recalls any of that country-bumpkin, if sentimental, feel and taste.
Part of the enormous growth market (some 42% since 1993, volumes of 127-million litres in 1995/6) of what is known in the trade as “alcoholic fruit beverages”, some passing as “cider”, are simply apple- flavoured drinks with alcohol. The better ones use real fruit as a fermentation base; others don’t even declare themselves.
Fighting it out at the top of the range is Crown Premium Dry and Hunter’s Gold. While the latter claims that it “refreshes like nothing on earth”, like Crown it has put its marketing money where its potential mouth is by supporting young and hip adventure sports such as soccer and abseiling.
Both are quite delicious, balancing sweet and dry and a “rewarding” apple-fruitiness when really cold. At alcohol between 4,5% and 5% there are times (like at your private beach on a sunny day!) when it is better than beer.
Closer to the real thing – with a more complex taste, higher alcohol content, stronger “mouth feel” – is the yuppie favourite, Savanna. It’s real cider – and really nice, with a full fermented apple flavour, supported by wood and alcohol of 6%.
Taking the magazine Hotelier & Caterer’s prediction seriously that “taste and image … seem to be driving the … market at its current heady pace”, Savanna comes in the chic-est of clear glass bottles and the wittiest of pay-off lines: “Dry but you can drink it.”
And more and more are taking to it. So much so that product manager Martin Scoble at Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery has to keep an eye on apple availability.
Also in a hip, eye-catching bottle this month is Scrumpy Jack. A real cider and plugged, until recently, as our first draught cider from the world’s “largest cider manufacturer”, this version is set to tackle the other okes in the bar in a classically crisp, bittersweet way.
Yup, though it seems plain ol’ apples are no longer currency for corruption, there’s more than one willing Eve out there who is going to seduce her trendy Adam this summer. And there’s plenty of cider to choose for the toast.