Tim Bannerman's Cider Chronicles - Part 4 - A Real Corker
Duck egg and granulated cream, blue sky and blackthorn, the first pear blossom bursting through the bud. On this miraculous March morning in its drifts of mist and the fragile shells of children waiting for the bus to school, the yellow hair of one just catches the sun and seems immune from the madness and distress out there that streams above their semi-conscious awakening to the world.
It is time to think about bottling.
Having successfully soutired or racked the cider, emptying the venerable 1200 into a series of other smaller, all oak, of course, it was time, in our little beginner’s cider-making home in France, to think about how to keep its beauty safe and whole.
Before that though, it’s worth talking about this ‘oak’ business. Few artisan cider-makers these days use oak barrels and there are several reasons for this. Oak barrels are harder to clean and more prone to problems, that’s for sure. They also lend a particular goût or flavour to the cider, or whatever liquor you choose to put inside it. This is not to everyone’s taste these days and you will find at cider tastings that, for the most part, the quest for ‘pure juice’ cider does not allow for, or at least encourage, the particular character oak gives. This isn’t true of all, of course. Some people, perhaps with traditional leanings, love the oakiness of an old-fashioned cider either fermented or matured or both in oak.
New oak is tricky. Fine for Bourbon whisky and other spirits, calvados or cider brandy included, using either American or Spanish oak, occasionally French, such as from the forests of Allier, or Italian and, more rarely, from the UK, where I happen to know there are active coopers in Somerset who supply the more adventurous cider-maker. The problem is, again, the goût, which with new oak is much more pronounced.
So most cider-makers of the artisanal or craft variety, if they want to use oak, go for barrels that have been previously owned, as they say. The easiest to get hold of – and these days, no barrels are easy to get hold of – are whisky barrels. The purists, however, of whom I can think of one in particular, throw up their hands in horror at the thought. It’s grain. It’s peat. It’s smoke. It’s NOT RIGHT!
On the other hand, I can think of another hugely respected cider-makers, father and son, not 5 miles from my neck of the woods now, in Herefordshire, who relish the strange qualities an ex-Islay malt barrel endows to cider. Smoky, peaty, stap-me-sporran, och aye. And indeed, when we came back to cider-making after a gap of nearly 20 years, having moved to Herefordshire and planted our own traditional orchard, the first barrels we had came from Scotland.
It just so happens that, going back 250 years or so, one William Bannerman and his son, Andrew, were tenant farmers to the Duke of Atholl in a little hamlet, these days next to Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, called Tullibardine. And if you should ever find yourself meandering off the Gleneagles golf course in a happy haze, or thick fog, you might well stumble on a beautiful late mediaeval building, miraculously unscathed from the desecration of the Reformation of 1560.
There, on the outside of Tullibardine Chapel, is the gravestone of my five times great-grandfather who died in 1812. Under his and his wife, Louisa’s name, lie those of his eldest son, Henry, and second son, Andrew, followed by 10 others. While Henry went down to Manchester to seek his fortune in the burgeoning cotton trade, Andrew stayed and according to Samuel Morewood’s ‘Inventions and Customs in the Use of Intoxicating Liquor’, published in 1824, by 1821, he was producing annually 45,631 gallons of spirit at 7 over proof. What is more remarkable still is that it was all above board, being one of 110 legitimate malt distillers listed at that time. There were, it won’t surprise you, an awful lot more bootleggers out there who weren’t listed on anything except a charge sheet from Scottish Customs and Excise.
The grave of Tim’s illustrious ancestor
Sadly, Andrew was the last of the line to make the original, proper Tullibardine whisky and one day I shall dig to see if I can find a last surviving cask/jar/bottle of the stuff, buried in a bunker on the Gleneagles golf course – or perhaps under an immaculate green on the 18th hole, who knows.
Since then, the name has been revived on the site of an old brewery in neighbouring Blackford but I fear it’s a pale shadow of William and Andrew’s original 7 over proof. Nevertheless, when I turned up on their doorstep claiming, if not droit de seigneur, then at least kinship with the origin of it all, their delightful Master Distiller not only took Gill and I round for a thorough, private tasting of the goods, we were able to buy and take way two 230 l. barrels (empty, naturally) for a special, one-off price of £20 each. You can multiply that by at least x 10, eight years on. And the smell in the car was worth the trip alone.
But my preference is to stick to apples wherever possible as an antecedent. So a Calvados barrel is nirvana, of course, particularly as I’ve been lucky to find one, or two in fact, that still blow your head off when your stick your hooter in the hole. Thank you, Julian. Because the beauty of an older barrel, and the risk, is that you inherit whatever lived in it before.
Oak breathes. It absorbs and exhales. But the amazing thing about our old casserole, as a French piano tuner once described our piano, which was hurtful if entirely deserved, was that it was droit. A barrel that had seen war, famine, all manner of bashing about and no doubt had harboured a fugitive or two along the way – it was brilliant. ‘Straight’ – in goût, if nothing else. ‘Correct’, if you prefer.
So the modern craft cider-maker uses stainless steel, or plastic, because they are easier to clean and more controllable – and have no goût, other than the fruit itself. Which is all good. But – thanks to our casserole, we have hung on to oak, with plastic in support and, who knows, may well move on to stainless steel once our orchard in Herefordshire, where we now live, crops more heavily. However, good oak barrels, as I mentioned, are getting harder to find and cost a fortune. So we’ll find what we can to keep the tradition – and the goût – going, but don’t hold your breath. The future is here. And it’s not very oaky.
Back to bottles.
When you’re starting from scratch and have very little spare cash but are intent on making the best comme il faut bottled cider, or cidre bouché, as they call it – ‘corked cider’ in other words (not the same at all as ‘corked wine’ you’ll be glad to know) – you need bottles. Not any old bottles but proper champagne bottles, designed to withstand considerable pressure from the fizz within.
Where to find them, without splashing out on a pallet of new ones? The small ads in our local newspaper, L’Eveil du Pays d’Auge, provides the key.
The first farm we visit, we are greeted by a charming, elderly gentleman who takes us round to his old, tumble-down barn and there, under a pile of derelict machinery, lies a stash of old, very old bottles that he no longer had use for. We pay him the modest sum requested and load them up in the boot of our almost equally old, if exquisitely beautiful barouche. All right, not quite a barouche in the strictest sense, but how would you describe the revolutionary spacecraft, designed by Italian sculptor Flaminio Bertoni and French aeronautical engineer André Lefèbvre and first appearing in 1955?
We know it as the fabled Citroën DS, the wittiest initials of all car models, surely, if you pronounce it the French way. ‘Goddess’ that she was, we could only afford a well-worn, mechanically less exotic version from 1963 called the ID – and there you go again. This ‘Idea’ of a car was irresistible at first sight. A seductive shade of cream, if you ignored the bubbles and odd dent in her exotic lines, she rose like Venus from the waves every time you pressed the starter button, shook out her crinoline and prepared for action.
Well, almost every time. Unfortunately, the revolutionary design had a hydraulic fluid that worked not just suspension but steering and brakes as well. Brilliant idea – except when it leaked its liquide rouge all over the road underneath the car, which it had a habit of doing in those early models. Then you were buggered, basically. Nevertheless, my wife was never less than Jeanne Moreau, white gloved at the wheel, sailing serenely into the sunset. While I, of course, was broken-nosed Jean-Paul Belmondo, cheroot between chiseled lips, insouciant of the brigand in the backseat, his pistol pressed against my neck.
The bottles were the real thing but filthy and, as we found out, hell to clean. When you have washed 500 bottles by hand, knowing that, potentially, there’s another 500 or so to come, you reach a point at which the washer (my wife, Gill, for the vast percentage of the task) wants to scream and throw the bottles, and themselves, out the window. Unfortunately by this time I was setting up my first company using theatre as a training and development tool which meant frequent trips on the ferry over to England. And one year I found myself skimming the roofs of Hong Kong as you did then, on the way to spend three days alone with 160 mostly female, Australian travel agents – without a clue about what was expected of me. So, all too often, I wasn’t there to help. Still the children were great at all sorts of cider-orientated things, even bottle-washing at a pinch.
Somehow not only did the bottles get washed, precisely 1,001 of them by the end of the process on one particular year, but we remained married and by the time for bottling, it was all hands to the pump.
Bottling is quite good fun when you get the hang of it. First of all, you need the bottles and they must be clean. We never sterilised them, or anything else for that matter, but just used water, a brush and a great deal of elbow grease.
And some of them were beautiful, in different, striated shades of green, almost blue in some cases, with deeply set ‘punts’ to protect them in the bottom.
Having flirted briefly with idea of being a glass-blower on leaving university, to the extent of learning the basics of the craft and trying, and failing, to find someone who would take me on, I had a feel for glass, old glass in particular. The art of drinking-, window- or bottle-glass-making, is one of consummate skill, at least until automation became the standard means of production. The champagne bottle, in particular, owes a huge debt to one Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) who, if anyone deserves the name, was indeed a Renaissance man.
Like me, he had an MA Cantab without taking an exam but there the resemblance very definitely ends. Amongst other things, he was a courtier and a diplomat, a natural philosopher and astrologer, a Catholic who converted to Anglicanism and back again, for political expedience, a privateer (a form of licensed pirate), an author of several philosophical books, a propounder of the ‘powder of sympathy’ (which treated the wound by treating the thing that had caused it) and an early notion of the role of oxygen and photosynthesis in plants, a canny businessman who cornered the market in sealing wax, quite a man for the ladies, a founding member of the Royal Society, a great cook, a pal of Fermat of the famous mathematical theorem, and, last, but most importantly, can make a legitimate claim to be called the father of the modern wine and, yes, cider bottle.
This new bottle enabled liquor to be preserved and transported in ways that had been near impossible before, thanks to the strength, colouring (green or brown) and stability of the bottle. This was achieved through the use of coal rather than wood to heat the furnace, with the aid of a wind tunnel that improved the draught, and heaps of potash and lime. Lord John Scudamore was another polymath and the great promoter of the Hereford Redstreak cider apple in the 17th century. He introduced cider and perry to the highest in the land, no doubt benefiting from Digby’s innovatory genius. And our bottles, dating to well before the Second World War, if not the First, were things of beauty and staying power with an individual character to each one – if hell to clean.
When the specific gravity dropped below 1.020, come February/March, or sometimes later, we knew we had to get our skates on. So – we had bottles, but no corks.
For those who know an old children’s book called The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf, first published in 1937 and revived as a Disney cartoon in 2017, you will remember the little bull who liked nothing better than to sit under a cork tree and smell the flowers. I, my children and theirs too now, know it by heart from my mother’s well thumbed copy, given to her when the Battle of Britain was raging in 1940. They will see clear as day the little bunches of corks hanging from the tree – and smell the flowers as we did every time we read that page.
Unfortunately, the little bull got bigger and bigger and one day ‘he didn’t look where he was sitting and instead of sitting on the nice cool grass in the shade he sat on a bumble bee’. As a consequence, he found himself at the bull fights in Madrid, saved only because of the flowers in the lovely ladies’ hair. No matter what they did, he wouldn’t fight so they had to take him back to his favourite cork tree and, for all we know, he’s sitting there still, just smelling the flowers.
Real corks, however, come from the bark of the cork tree, the evergreen oak – that tree again - Quercus suber or sometimes the deciduous Quercus occidentalis, which grows all round the Mediterranean area, from Portugal, Spain, France, and right round to North Africa. They are cut in a way that allows the bark to regenerate and a good, healthy cork tree can produce cork from 20 years old to 150, happily donating its harvest along the way.
The problem these days is not that cork is becoming hard to obtain, it’s that more and more people are turning to screw or beer caps, plastic – anything but cork. Which means the traditional cork forests are falling into decay, with some at risk of being dug up and replaced with something more profitable. But, like oak, we’re hanging in there, for better or worse, and doing our bit for the cork.
We bought most of our kit from the local quincaillerie, ironmongers to you and me, including proper, Liege-type corks, rather than ‘agglomerate’, which you could buy at 2, 3 or 5 year quality. Not knowing how long we might keep the stuff, we went for 5, I’m pretty sure. Nearly 20 years later, on moving from Oxfordshire to Herefordshire, we found an old bottle of our French cider in a corner of our garage. To say goodbye to our house in Watlington, we opened it and it was beautiful – golden, clear and sparkling although it oxidised very fast. The key is to keep it on its side so the cork can never dry out and shrink and it will be as good as the day it was made, if not a good deal better. If you’re lucky.
So with the old barrel now hovering at 1.014, champleur or quenelle to some (a wooden tap to you and me) holding firm in its little hole low down at the business end next to the guichet, and flowers exploding in all directions in the orchard and the woods outside, we were ready.
Bottles, corks, corking machine, wires and twister, and an army of children in support, all we needed now was a clear sky – and the moon.
Au clair de la lune
Mon ami Pierrot.
Prête-moi ta plume
Pour ecrire un mot…
Editor’s Note
Just a quick addition here - I have acquired a gadget which allows me to digitise old video tapes - and here are just a few old Hi8 shots of the wonderful house and garden that Tim and Gill used to live in across the Channel in Normandy. A gang of us were there many years ago and we helped plant a couple of the apple trees. Hope Tim, Gill and the kids (and mine for that matter) won’t mind being in the public view over a quarter of a century later.
And talking of digitising old video tapes - I am also planning to work on some others shot in another professional format this weekend - which will show Tim at the amazing apple tree fair in Lisieux…
