Things in bottles: Cider

Recoding Cider

ivo. — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:32:10 GMT

For today’s article, I’m moving away from the wines of Roero and Piemonte1 to introduce another side of Things in Bottles. A few weeks ago, I read ’s article “Recoding orange wine,” arguing for the realigning of the term orange wine away from its current cultural connotations and baggage, back to a general term to describe the process/tradition of extended macerations of white grapes. On a similar “linguistics and orange wine” level, ’s “Don’t F***ing call it skin-contact” was another great article.

There are no historical references to Ludwig Wittgenstein being a fan of ~~skin-contact~~ orange wines. Indeed, most sources describe him as having a quasi-monastic approach to gastronomy. However, if he was still alive (and maybe even writing a substack), as a philosopher of language I’m sure he would have been interested in people trying to reject the meaning of a word being defined by its use in specific contexts rather than what it exactly refers to.

That is a rather arsey way to say that, aside from them being great articles, they are both arguing for a general restructuring of some of the language we use to describe certain wines. Landa thinks that orange wine has become too specific a term, lending itself to lazy use and misunderstanding, when really it should occupy a similar space as red, white, or rose, none of which carry as much baggage. Similarly, Woolf thinks skin-contact is incorrectly used as synonymous with orange on wine lists when the real definition of skin-contact would also include red and rosé.

Both articles, whether or not you agree with them, highlight a general linguistic deficiency that we have in English for describing such topics. So, whilst we’re at it, I’d also like to propose a term that needs rethinking/redefining or, as Landa puts it, Recoding.

The term in question is Cider.

Cider’s recoding needs to be quite an intensive surgery. Much needs to be removed, replaced, rejigged, moved around for the term to be of any use. I don’t think any of these actions will come from a single group of people, so the more that are aware, the better.

To show why I think cider needs recoding, let’s start off with a general outline of wine:

The product of a single, yearly, harvest of grapes, pressed and fermented. The conditions in that year leading up to that harvest dictate a large part of what the wine is like in that year. Beyond the grape variety, that after its planting can’t really be considered a “variable,” the rest of the deciding force of what that wine will be in that year is up to the people working at the winery/vineyard to decide how and what they are going to produce.

Now, let’s look at what the outline of cider would be if it has been recoded:

The product of a single, yearly, harvest of apples, pressed and fermented. The conditions in that year leading up to that harvest dictate a large part of what the cider is like in that year. Beyond the variety of apple, that after its planting can’t really be considered a “variable,” the rest of the deciding force of what that cider will be in that year is up to the people working at the cider/orchard to decide how and what they are going to produce.

Where’s the problem?

If you noticed the fact that my outline of cider is what it would be as opposed to what it is then it will come as no surprise that what I’ve outlined above is actually a far cry from where the legal definition of cider stands.

If you haven’t seen the below image printed out and blu tac’d onto the wall/window of a natural wine bar, it lists the authorised products that can go into wine depending on what certification (if any at all) it is made in accordance to:

Some people, understandably, don’t like the idea of making wine by adding a bunch of stuff into it that isn’t grapes. Whether or not you are one of these people, I think you can still agree on one fundamental principle: even if you add whatever cocktail of additives to your wine, it should still be primarily made out of grapes.

Somehow in the cider world that message hasn’t got through. There would be a slightly easier, though still quite difficult, argument to make if the limit was at 50 or 51%, but it’s not. It’s

all

the

way

down

at 35%

And that isn’t even the last of it!

The 35% can all come from concentrate!

This means that since the law mandates only a starting sugar level of this “juice,” industrial producers can concentrate their juice and then add back in more water than they ever took out.

I’ll just write that in bold so that the people who skim read this articles still get the message:

For cider to be considered “cider” it only needs to contain 35% apple juice

Say it with me reader:

What the fuck is going on!

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This is where the recoding needs to start. Increasing that 35% to even 50% or, dare I say it 51%, would be a step in the right direction. Thankfully, the wheels have already been set in motion for this, but my god have they been met with resistance.

The team at Redvers, a small producer in Herefordshire using only 100%, wrote to their MP, Ellie Chowns, last year to call for change. They argue that this low 35% threshold was damaging both to producers of 100% cider and also to traditional orchards - planted on standard rootstocks with canopies high enough to graze livestock underneath.

Ellie Chowns submitted a written question on raising the 35% limit to 50% and got this as a response from Dame Angela Eagle, the minister for food security and rural affairs:

“Not what consumers in the UK would expect”

I’m aware that neither personal experience nor anecdotal experience are “consumer” experience, so I won’t pass them off as such. Instead, lets have a look at some cider advertising, which also relies on “consumer expectation”

For £11.99 (shipping not included) you can buy yourself a Inch’s Cider pint glass on Amazon.

On the front of the glass, in very clear writing, outlined clearly so that all the “consumers” can see it, it says “100% British Apples”

As is customary in the UK, ingredients lists are written in order of how much of the product is made up of each ingredient. If, as they claim, Inch’s is “100% British Apples” the ingredients list should read as follows:

Apple Juice
Maybe some other bits and bobs like sulphites

And nothing else.

But it doesn’t. Instead, the ingredients list for Inch’s cider reads

Water
Apple juice
All the other bits and bobs like sulphites

How is this possible?

How can a product that is “100% British apples” contain more water than it does apples? What is the “consumer” supposed to “expect”?

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“100% British apples” is a claim about Britishness and not about appleness

Heineken, the owner of Inch’s, doesn’t disclose the juice content of their cider.

I would nonetheless argue that writing “100% British Apples” surrounded by hundreds of apples and no Union Jack’s is playing on “consumer expectation” that the product is made of 100% apples and not that its 100% British.

Why should I care?

Another thing to make clear is that whilst the legal threshold is only 35% juice, there is still a strong collection of producers in the UK that stick to producing their ciders and their perries with 100% juice. The problem is that they have no legal protection above the 35% threshold.

I’m not arguing that a beverage made from 35% juice shouldn’t exist. I’m arguing that this beverage is in no way deserving of the title Cider. Call it something else instead like “alcoholic apple drink”.

To really answer the question of why should I care? there are thousands of answers. If you like drinking natural/authentic wines because you like drinking products that are born of people’s love of their land and their fermented craft then you should care about protecting these producers.

If you care about halting the normalisation of blanket pesticide use in agriculture then you should care. Where intensive orchards (the sort that Heineken felled 300 acres worth of a few years ago) need intensive spraying in order to manage diseases, traditional orchards are planted on standard rootstocks and grow to such a height that they support the grazing of livestock underneath them and need no spraying at all.

If you care about agricultural integrity, greenwashing, FARMWASHING, or British food sovereignty you should care. Alongside allowing all the apple juice to be concentrated in the production of “cider,” there is no required declaration of the origin of this apple juice concentrate. Plenty of the apple juice concentrate used for cider produced and sold in the UK comes from Eastern Europe. I have nothing against Eastern Europe or Eastern European apples, but if your whole brand image is centred on being British and cider’s inherent British symbolism, I want it to be grown in Britain!

Sure, it might seem like a fool’s errand to get caught up on this sort of thing, but when we stop caring about these things, we let down our guard on the rest of our food traditions. It is these food traditions, these traditional agricultural practices, ways of life, landscapes and economies that function as the connection between ourselves and our land. Without them, there is nothing stopping us from being anybody anywhere. As I have written before on here, when you enter into a British supermarket, you are neither in a time nor a place. Instead, you find yourself in a plastic wrapped selection of fruits and vegetables that are devoid of any seasonal or geographic changes, no matter where you go. Consuming anything that it is domestically produced, wherever you may live, is really what it means to be of a place; not just living in a place but living through a place in all its seasons and climates and traditions.

In search of Italian Cider

ivo. — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:53 GMT

Writing this story should be simple. It should go something like:

Cider was made in Italy, predominantly in the Alpine Valleys to the north
Mussolini’s government made cider production illegal
Its now seeing a slow but steady resurgence and has great promise as an industry

And that functions as a great “tl;dr” but if, like me, you care about the “why?” for all/any of that, I suggest you carry on reading…

1927 was a great year for Italian wine. I haven’t read any vintage reports about 1927 but I do know one thing: that year Mussolini outlawed the production of all alcoholic beverages that weren’t wine. Much like using herbicide to remove other plants from a vineyard to limit competition with the vines, he had stamped out everything else that might ever outcompete the rise of Italian wine.

“Were Italians producing anything else except wine anyway?”

Good question.

The answer is an interesting one but requires the explanation of a few other facts - namely what is meant by “Italians” and what is meant by “wine”. These are two things that might appear as clearly defined now, but for a long time were imbued with a strong element of fluidity.

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Italians and italians

66 years before 1927 was 1861, the year of Italian Unification. People often talk about “how young Italy is” as a country but I don’t think they really understand what that really means (I probably don’t understand it fully either).

The various states of the Italian peninsula were brought under the banner of one nation, of course. However, on a human level there were a bunches of people had to contend with calling other groups of people compatriots when they never had had any connection these people before. Barely any of them spoke the same language, they didn’t eat the same food, believe in the same religion1 or even measure their fields in the same way. In short, they were communities each with a fundamentally different understanding of the world around them. Creating a cohesive national identity out of a group of people as diverse as this is probably like trying to arrange jigsaw when none of the pieces fit together - you need to cut your own notches to fit them together.

For cider culture to be outlawed as “foreign” in Italy, a sense of “indigenous” must be created that things can be rejected against.

I present a small guide:

Useful things to create a homogenous national identity:

Mind your language

If you spend an extended period in Italy, usually outside of a metropolitan centre or tourist hotspot, and develop a good understanding of the language, you will likely encounter one of the Italian “dialects.” sums up this inevitable encounter perfectly:

You freeze. You smile. You pray for subtitles.

But these prayers go unheard. What is that language? You think to yourself. You know that you’ve been learning Italian for years but you’ve never come across phrases like “è parej” or “Fa’ ballà l’oeucc” before.

In that post by Italy Untold (below), it’s laid out very clearly how this change from linguistic diversity to homogeneity came about.

To add one interesting aspect not mentioned in that article. Linguistically, these “dialects” are not “dialects” at all but languages. The word “dialect” implies the existence of a mother language from which other languages derive - which Italian as it is spoken today and its “dialects” are not2. Instead, “Italian” as it’s spoken today is based on Florentine and the northern and southern “dialect” groups both have distinct mother languages, and therefore are mutually unintelligible from each other.

I presume, though haven’t thoroughly researched this hypothesis, that these regional tongues were relegated from language to dialect in part as to undermine each region in its distinct identity and therefore make the idea of a cohesive, national, whole more appealing.

Food

Sharing food, like sharing language, is a great way of making people feel connected.

On the flip side, not sharing food is a great way of making people feel disconnected.

Creating a national cuisine beyond just a regional cuisine functions to do both of these things at the same time: make all nationals connected whilst identifying all those who aren’t nationals as such by the fact they don’t eat the same food. It is, therefore, a hugely important tool in the creation of a homogenous nation.

For Italy, the first stone laid in the creation of what would later become Italian Cuisine as it is today came 30 years after unification in the form of Pellegrino Artusi’s La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene or “Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well,” to you and me.

Armed with both language and cuisine, alongside the radio and television, Mussolini came to power in 1922. If there were any doubts/threats/questions about the fragility of the Italian identity, they certainly wouldn’t last long.

At this point, I should probably clarify that I don’t think Mussolini is/was solely responsible for making Italy and Italianness what it is today. The cultural homogenisation that occurred post unification was in keeping with general trends across Europe and indeed to be expected for any nation that has recently unified. However, it is clear that there are certain cultural practices, such as the making of cider (on which this article is focused) that were discarded from the cannon of commonly recognised Italian practices that may have remained had there not been a government that so readily marginalised the practices of Italians who were seen as “at odds” with the mainstream concept of “Italy” at the time.

So, with a language, people and culture all beginning to take homogenous shape, any other features of the cultural landscape that are at odds with mainstream “Italianness” were seen as “foreign” and therefore needed to be removed. I’m sure there are plenty of instances of this. For one, the word “sandwich” was considered too American by the Mussolini government and was replaced with “tramezzino,” a word invented by Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet and man credited with Partially inventing Italian fascism. This article is however, focused on cider, not sandwiches.

To the mountains we go

Overlooking Valdieri, Cuneo Province, Piemonte

The lower, more expansive, and rolling hills of Italy are associated with grapes. It is only once you start getting to higher territories that apples and pears start to appear in a meaningful way. In these higher valleys, the grapevine often struggles to perform in the freezing winters and hot, short, summers and therefore requires only perfectly exposed plots and most fervent worshipers of the grapevine in order to survive - something that is not present in every valley.

The valleys of Piemonte are, like all valleys of the Italian Alps, liminal spaces. Neither “here” nor “there”. Spaces where identity is not conferred through borders and limitations but through relationships and interactions. Consequently, their practices, rituals and identity are in conflict with an Italian identity that is clearly defined, unchanging and permanent - as Mussolini would have preferred it. Whilst the fascist regime used imagery of man’s domination over nature, the priorities of these communities were often maligned3.

Since Neolithic times in these spaces it was common for livestock that had been kept in stables or lowland pasture during the winter to be walked up along roads and through villages to reach their mountain pastures for the summer once they had cleared of snow. Grazing both on the way up in the spring and down once they had exhausted all that the pasture that the mountains had to offer and temperatures were starting to drop. For a beautifully represented and well written story focusing how the transhumance manifests itself in all forms dairy, I cannot suggest ’s substack highly enough - it is an incredibly beautiful and well written body of work.

Part of this seasonal travel incorporated silvo-pastoralism – the practice of controlled livestock grazing of pastures under tree cover. In mountain communities, this practice allowed for the cultivation of important “perennial woody crops” (trees) on land that could also help to sustain livestock - thus allowing the land to benefit the community twice over. In a post “green-revolution” era this is often relegated to the leagues of fanciful farming practices with no real profitable application. In mountain communities it was a way of cultivating trees for nuts (and therefore bread), baskets (and therefore increase harvest capacities), clogs (ditto), oil and fire wood whilst also using the land as grazing for livestock.

The Return of the Herd (Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565) (source: Wikimedia).

“But what does this have to do with cider?”

Well, I had always thought of alpine silvopastoralism as being used almost exclusively in conjunction with chestnut trees. Known as "L’albero del pane” or tree of bread in English, it is both a large tree resistant to the force of a cow scratching its arse on its trunk and a giver of a multiplicity of incredibly useful products (as mentioned before). Indeed, many of the alpine technologies that are still visible in the valleys to this day are build around the cultivation chestnuts.

You might now expect an obvious segue to the tune of “but they also grazed under apple orchards!” Hold your horses. We haven’t got there yet.

I contacted an apple farmer friend (also called Ivo) who farms just outside of the tiny tiny town of Valgrana. Over several WhatsApp audio messages recorded as we walked around his fields, he explained to me that the cultivation of walnuts was also very prevalent in the valleys. These nuts would be harvested and then taken to community mills in town centres where they would be crushed and pressed for oil. The crushing and pressing of nuts for oil requires the same tools as the crushing and pressing of apples for juice, albeit with some small modifications. Growing seasons being as short as they are in Alpine valleys, the accompanying approach to surplus is one that is also seeing huge revival amongst modern restaurants: “Zero Waste.” Another producer I spoke to, further north in Val di Susa, wrote to me about huge piles of apples being left in the town square in the valley for any and all to come along and to take apples for cider, vinegar and juice.

This zero waste mentality also applied to any wine production in these areas. Whilst modern winemakers benefit from hydraulic presses being able to press every last drop out of grapes when making wine, they are in a tiny minority if we consider winemakers throughout history. Instead of letting grape skins that still contain some flavour and/or sugar and therefore can be fermented go to waste, they were added to apple juice and fermented together as a grape-apple hybrid.

Fascist dictators, generally speaking, are opposed to the idea of hybridisation or mixing. They often prefer purity. I’m sure I don’t need to provide examples for this. In the case of mountain communities and their ferments, however, the case is particularly interesting. If cider was seen as something “foreign” and therefore to be outlawed, wine was seen as the chosen drink of Italian culture and history.

A mix of cider and wine?

Heresy.

Apple varieties still cultivated by Ivo in Valgrana

The water mill of Valgrana doesn’t run anymore. There are some carp in its millrace and the town, with its 800 inhabitants and 4 churches, sits quietly nestled in the valley behind Caraglio, a town “famous” only for its Bagna Cauda festival4. Passing through it today, it seems like a sleepy Italian town - a true paesello. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was over 2,500 people living there. Ivo told me that the varieties of apples grown in the valley were in their thousands. Its likely some were landrace varieties specifically matched to the environment of the specific valley where they grew. He explained to me that people in the valley would have their apples pressed and milled and then they would make their own cider at home for home consumption - not something to be commercialised.

The decline

The winter of 1927 rolled around. Livestock moved off their mountain pastures for the winter. Apples and nuts harvested, processed and stored. Cheeses ageing. The change for this season - cider had been made illegal.

Production didn’t stop immediately - people likely weren’t going to be prosecuted for making cider in the valleys since it was largely a familial affair. However the ban definitely put the breaks on any growth for Italian autochthonous apple production and culture. This can still be seen today. The top apple cultivars grown in Italy today are the likes of Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Gala and Granny Smith. I hope it comes as no surprise that Maria Ann “Granny” Smith, of the eponymous apple variety, was Australian, not Italian.

It’s possible that apple production would have weathered this change in the law if it weren’t for another very big problem - the Second World War. This was a particular pressing issue for the inhabitants of the Piemontese Valleys as they made up one of heartlands of the Italian Anti-fascist resistance movement. In a situation of death or liberty, apple cultivation, understandably, doesn’t get a look in. The war, together with an increasingly industrialised society saw valley populations plummet and in their absence so too was the cultivation of Italian apples almost lost.

When Mussolini eventually fell and the new Republic of Italy was brought in, cider was hardly on the tips of everyone’s tongue. Whilst it probably wasn’t outright illegal in the way it had been before the war, nobody was making it and so there wasn’t any market for it either. With nobody making it, there doubtless would have been many a tax document that would have been required for the duty to be paid.

This would be more effort than it was worth especially considering that a hugely profitable, international, Italian wine boom was about to start taking off not long after the war. This boom would end up being so successful that people would start cutting corners and adding methanol to their wines which in turn made people go blind - though this is a story for another time.

It was only in 2015 that the legal position of cider with regard to duty taxes was clarified. The modern Italian ‘ciderscape’ is a drop in the ocean compared to the wine industry. The producers of modern Italian cider are, however, incredibly interesting people especially in their production philosophies and lack of recent historical context compared to wine. Their work, and fast arriving fame, I will cover in a future article(s).

L’Ombra di un bel fior

To conclude this article, I would like to focus on the song Bella Ciao. Though this is often quoted as the anthem of the Italian resistance, it seems as though there is little evidence to suggest it was actually sung by the partigiani during WWII. Similarly, there is no evidence to suggest that cider was “the drink of the partisans” and helped fuel an anti-fascist revolution, so I am not going to write that here either. I will, however, take artistic licence with the lyrics of the song. If you don’t know these lyrics, I suggest looking them up, they are incredibly emotive.

Through the song, the central figure sings:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

O Partisan, take me away.
Take me away as I feel as though I may die.
And if I die, I die as a partisan
And you must bury me up there in the mountain
Under the shade of a beautiful flower.
And the people that pass by will say "what a beautiful flower."
This is the flower of the partisan
Who died for liberty

The “flower of the partisan” (il fiore del partigiano) is cited as being the wild red poppy. However, when I go to the mountains with my friends, I can’t help but noticing some of the ancient apple trees that are dotted around the valley, especially when they are in blossom. These trees stand as testament to a different age. The people who own them refuse to let them go, krummholz and covered in moss, planks of wood are often needed to make sure they don’t fell themselves under the weight of fruit and then snow. Yet they remain standing and remain fruiting. Though they may groan under the weight of fruit, they remained unbending in the fight for freedom.

If you are lucky enough to come across an Italian cider, you are not just drinking a country’s first steps in rediscovering its apple culture, you are also drinking a bottle of fermented freedom.

Whilst the majority of people on the Italian peninsula were catholics, the mountain regions towards France, Switzerland and Germany included protestant minorities

An example of this would be the Yorkshire dialect that derives from English. As opposed to Welsh and English, which do not have a contemporary mother language from which they both descend

From Cadarese to Morasco: the creation of a Fascist hydroscape in alpine space after 1928 https://boris-portal.unibe.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/2ad8ee8d-0881-4952-9a82-978bcb13a72b/content

https://laguida.it/2025/11/14/a-caraglio-la-22a-fiera-aj-a-caraj-e-la-sagra-della-bagna-cauda/

Things in bottles: Cider

Recoding Cider

Where’s the problem?

For cider to be considered “cider” it only needs to contain 35% apple juice

What the fuck is going on!

“Not what consumers in the UK would expect”

“100% British apples” is a claim about Britishness and not about appleness

Why should I care?

Further Reading:

In search of Italian Cider

Italians and italians

Useful things to create a homogenous national identity:

Mind your language

Food

To the mountains we go

The decline

L’Ombra di un bel fior