Little Pomona C'est Si Bon-Bonne

My first thought is that the tannins are beautiful. Present, prominent, yet in no way abrasive. They curl round your tongue and in behind your teeth like a cat settling on your shoulders; it's lovely but if it it weren't lovely the cat wouldn't care and would still do it. Purring, rounded, but irresistible.

Then there's a metallic, earthy note, which isn't quite iron. Is this bottling perhaps slightly less clean than other Little Pomonas? After all, relinquishing control of the maturation of a cider to an oak barrel, however carefully sourced, however thoroughly the bunghole has been sniffed, is always something of a risk.

Peach pits. And a rather pleasant acidity.

They're definitely mineralic, these tannins. Almost blue steel (as when one has made steel tough by heating it, perhaps by drilling it at too high a speed or without lubricants).

It seems to me tonight that of all the Little Pomonas this is the one where tannic structure is most important.

From memory I think I can dismiss The Rainbow and The Unicorn as flighty creatures of fruit.

The Old Man and the Bee had a ripe richness which dominated other aspects of its character. Feat of Clay was brighter and sunnier - youthful choirboys beautifully chanting psalms rather than the Mongolian throat songs of Bonbonne.

If this were wine I'd call these tannins chalky. Can I do that with cider?

Blue steel.

It's too full bodied to compare with Chablis, and there are these compelling tannins. But the blue steel.

It stays with you. The tannins don't want to leave. Like Secret Service agents, inexorably polite, Ma'am-ing to left and right and not moving no matter what you say.

Behind all that tannic action, there's something which might be fruit cake or dried apricots.

Here, tonight, this is the best cider I've yet tasted from Little Pomona, and I think it's a strong contender for my cider of the year. You should seek it out and try it.

(Now, quite clearly I'm not in any way impartial. The owners and makers of Little Pomona are very dear friends of mine, and I've helped out at every harvest since 2014. But that aside, I do think this is an exceptional bottle of cider)

Boring technical stuff: C'est Si Bon-Bonne is a dry, still cider from Herefordshire. It's made mainly from Dabinett, along with Harry Masters Jersey, Ellis Bitter, and Foxwhelp (I helped pick and press these last two). It was a wild ferment in an ex bourbon barrel, left for six months then racked into glass bonbonnes and aged without oxygen for a year.

You can read more about Little Pomona here.

Pilton Ice

Is it just me, or does everybody think of the Piltdown Man when they see a bottle of Pilton? Just me? Right. Fair enough.

This empty bottle held a most rare, and most tasty, liquid. Britain doesn't have the right climate to permit cider makers to make ice cider al fresco, so there's a good deal of faffing about with chest freezers, not to mention the difficulty of pressing frozen apples, or, as has happened in this case, the freezing and slow careful thawing of already pressed juice. The result is delightful.

(I should say, by the way, that this tasting note was written at a point when the bottle had been open a few days)

Colour is a vivid red amber. Not quite copper. Vivid and beautiful.

The nose is very earthy. It seems tannic  - so I guess it's making me think of apple skins. Mossy sticks. Spices and apple skins. Herbal? Aye, herbal, green-grey, lichen on stones . It's a fascinating herbiness. Grey-green, but not as sweet as sage.

The taste is tangy sweet, but with drying tannins. Earthy again. Vivid fruit acidity. Red fruits. Dark. Not yellow. Perhaps some green gooseberry acid. The tannins are very gentle. There's some bitterness in the finish, but it serves to balance the intense sweet attack. A delicious, complex drink.

I'd class it as Outstanding. Can I have some more please?

A Visit to Westons

After spending an intense day and a half helping my very good friends at Little Pomona bottle up a batch of their cider, it was instructive to go and see Westons at Much Marcle, who are most decidedly at the other end of the spectrum, both in size and in their practice.

The site is visible from quite a distance, thanks to the dozens of vast storage tanks which give it something of the air of an oil refinery. These 200,000 litre tanks hold the pressed, sterile filtered juice so that Westons can ferment and produce all year round.

The tour is an interesting mixture. It begins in the older buildings dating from perhaps a century ago, and the emphasis is on traditional production methods; there's even a stone mill wheel on display. But  then as we move through the production area we see, for example, a press as big as a house (granted, only a small holiday chalet, but I do literally mean a press as big as a house). And then again, a series of giant wooden tuns huddled together, somehow seeming to have a cathedral-like air to them.

Westons are very proud of their modern production methods. All the apple juice they press is passed through a micro filter to remove any trace of yeast, and then stored in the giant spaceship booster tanks until it's needed for fermentation, thus allowing them to produce continually all year round.

The juice is then fermented to a strength of 11%, in the pictured wooden vats, after which it is blended to whatever strength is required.

It's a curious mixture of modern and traditional. Fermenting in wooden tuns, yet sterile filtering the juice. Much of what Westons produce is sweetened, but then many small craft producers also accept the market demand and sweeten some part of their output. And Westons do make some very good vintage, oak-aged cider.

As you can perhaps tell, I'm in two minds about Westons. I'd far rather have a funky single varietal cloudy cider from Tom Oliver or Ross-on-Wye, but on the other hand if they grew big enough to be available in Sainsbury's, the liquid would very likely not be as interesting. 

I think the way to look at Westons is rather like Guinness or Lagavulin. They're all big, heavily marketed brands, but if you go into an otherwise uninspiring pub and see them, then you know you've got something decent to drink. Perhaps not amazing, but good enough.