Tim Bannerman's Diary of a Pantomime 7 - Cider Break
While the world goes mad – madder even than the one we’ve endured, for the most part, over the last two years – it is a privileged joy to turn to trees, cider apple trees in particular, as a way of leaving scenes of horror behind, even if only for a day. (Which is why you see Tim with cider-maker Julian Temperley in the photo above)
It is a month now since my last blog, featuring Gertrude Bugler, she who caught Thomas Hardy’s eye and heart in an amateur Dorset production of ‘The Woodlanders’ back in 1913, when the world was gearing up for the First “Great” World War, 109 years ago. A war that all who lived through it swore could never happen again. As they did a mere 20 years later when Hitler, claiming an historical right to Aryan lebensraum, annexed first Austria and then the Sudetenland, followed shortly by the rest of Czechoslovakia and then, the final straw, Poland in 1939. Chilling echoes we hear all too clearly in the light of Putin’s current invasion of Ukraine.
So while the Russian Army was massing on the Ukraine border, back at the beginning of February, off I went from our little village in Herefordshire to the borders of Somerset and Dorset and John and Sarah Whittick’s Specialist Apple Tree Nursery “Cider Apple Trees”, near Sparkford.
Apart from anything else, it was a break from the relentless process of working on our village “phantomime”, as one of our actors has christened it, “The Ghost of Garway Hall”, which has usurped our lives since the wine-drenched evening back in November when I agreed to take it on. More of which later.
On my way down, I thought I might drop in to an old acquaintance in the cider world, one Julian Temperley, whom I first met some 30 years ago when we were doing our apprenticeship in cider-making in the wilds of the Pays d’Auge in Normandy.
As I turned up into the bucolic cluster of farm buildings that comprise Burrow Hill in Kingsbury Episcopi, near Martock, on the Somerset Levels, the full scope of the Somerset Cider Brandy Company is discreetly concealed from view. Down below the yard where I parked my car lies the locked and sealed expanse of barrels, stacked in endless rows, brim-full of the distilled progeny of Josephine and Fifi, the two travelling stills brought back to Somerset from Normandy nigh on 25 years ago.
I’d come, for once, to give something back from all treasures I’d taken, at a very reasonable charge, of course, over the years since we’d restarted our cider-making once again, here in South Herefordshire, back in 2014.
The bottle I presented to Julian was one of a batch of a mere 120 or so to come from our 2021 vintage. Unlike in previous years when the whole family would descend to help us press our October harvest, that year, the Lockdown Year, it was just Gill and I, battling on alone over the weeks and months of pressing through the Autumn into Winter.
But what made it special, even, perhaps, the best cider we have ever made, was a magical fusion of variety and barrel. A freak, if calculated, blend of “on” bitter-sharps and bitter-sweets, combined with the beautiful barrique, bought fresh from its powerful, distiller’s strength 3 year old spirit that had been contained within its previously red Bordeaux-soused oak, mere days before I bought it from Julian on 22 September 2020.
That day, in Julian’s yard, a fresh crop of Bramleys were chuntering up the apple escalator from the washing vat, thence to pour in a steady stream into the pile ready for pressing. The art, as always, is in the blend and Julian suggested that we use some of our Bramleys from the one, ancient, yet still magnificently sturdy remnant of the original orchard in our plot, replanted by us from an otherwise bare field into the traditional, standard cider apple and perry pear quincunx that fills it to the brim now.
The high acidity of the Bramley offsets the high tannin of such as Tremlett’s Bitter, if used in modest proportions, of course. Too much and the cider will be too acidic, too little and the tannin will curl your tongue with its harsh, bitter, drying impact on the palate. So that is precisely what we did with our bumper crop of Tremlett’s, now two years on, still sitting in the bottle and gradually softening into what will, hopefully, become a fine, bright dry, what I call ‘morning’ cider. Just what you need as a little freshener before lunch after a good morning’s digging in the hot sun come a glorious June, July day.
For Julian’s barrel however, we filled its 228 litres of pale, clean French oak, bound with barked strips over the iron hoops “to catch the woodworm first”, with a blend of 60% Harry Master’s Jersey, 15% each of Kingston Black and Dabinett, with a final dash of Bramley for the final 10%.
It took Gill and I a hard four days of washing, scratting, pressing and filling, two days for each 110 litres or so, and then – there it was. We “racked” it twice (pumping it out to take it off the lees or active sediment left at the bottom of the barrel, then cleaning out the barrel and pumping it back in again), once soon after the first fermentation, having dropped from an original specific gravity of 1.055 to 10.40, and then again at 1.015.
When we bottled it, some five months after pressing, we knew it was special but it has only grown more so over the intervening year. And as we shared the bottle I’d brought as a thank you to Julian a month ago this year, with Mr Temperley himself, his master distillers and his daughter, Matilda, and her little new-born baby daughter, happily drinking herself, but not from the contents of the bottle, there was universal praise. “You can taste the spirit in it from the oak,” said Matilda, who now has a key role in running the Somerset Cider Brandy Company. And you can, within a golden, gently pétillant utter lusciousness that brought a smile to all concerned, little Isabel included.
The trees I bought from John and Sarah Whittick and their nurseryman son later that day – three Somerset Redtreaks and one Yarlington Mill – are now in the ground with a prayer that they might thrive and grow to a fine maturity and bring sanity and goodness, despite the wider madness out there.
Meanwhile the “phantomime” gathers pace. Books are being nervously put away by some at least, if not all, as we embark upon the final stretch of rehearsal before P-Day comes on 7th April, a mere whisp of a month away.
What the rest of the world will look like then, God only knows. Will sanity, even humanity, prevail? We can only hope so but I’m not counting on it.
