More than one bad apple: the sorry demise of English cider

Can you imagine if, in the 20th century, wine producers in France had switched from a product made (almost) entirely from grapes to something that was essentially grape-flavoured alcoholic sugar water? It’s inconceivable. In fact, they did just the opposite. To stamp out the growth of ersatz wines, the appellation contrôlée system was created, which, for all its faults, provides a guarantee that a particular wine will be made from grapes from a certain area.

But there was no such regulation in England. After the second world war, large-scale cider-makers in the West Country began lowering the amount of fruit in their products, specifically characterful bittersweet cider apples, and making up the rest with dessert apples and sugar. Quality plummeted. In his fascinating book Cider Country, James Crowden writes: ‘Bertram Bulmer once declared, in strict confidence, that you would not “catch him drinking any of his own products”.’

All this was done in the utmost secrecy. Crowden mentions a sinister conversation which Andrew Lea from the Long Ashton Research Station had with the technical director at Bulmers about changes to the company’s cider: ‘You must never mention these things to me again. Never talk about these things. These things are closed. They are secret. You must not tell anybody else what actually goes in cider.’ Blimey, it’s like something from the X Files.

The big cider-makers were applying a beer mentality to their products but, as Lea puts it, ‘cider works better when it is viewed as a wine’. The nadir came with the arrival of ‘white ciders’ in the 1980s, some of which were made from less than 7 per cent apples. ‘Cider has become little more than an alcopop,’ as Crowden puts it.

It’s a far cry from the drink’s 17th-century heyday, when gentlemen competed to produce wine-strength ciders.