Two Bottles 1785 Cider
We're drinking two bottles of fermented apple from 1785 Cider: Forêt Noire 2022 and Currant 2023, which includes blackcurrants in addition to apples.
We’re once again focusing on fermented orchard fruit. Fortunately, there’s a little overachiever in me, and I had already tasted in advance, so notes and photos were just waiting to be processed. A small bout of stomach flu can really ruin your appetite for pretty much everything, yes, even and especially alcohol. And unfortunately also for writing, because if you’re vegetating in bed, you can’t be typing away. Thankfully, the vegetating is subsiding, and at least the desire to write has had returned. The appetite for food and drink took a few more days to come back as translating took a bit more time too. At least food and drink were staying where they belong again, which was a step in the right direction. Just like the step of giving more space here to other fermented fruits. That’s definitely something I want to do more of throughout the year. What’s being made from apples and pears is simply too good not to feature here more often. We’re ending the small series with two sparkling apple wines from 1785 Cider in the Black Forest. It’s only fitting that after Christoph Raffelt (re)introduced me to Kertelreiter in my timeline, 1785 Cider followed as a discovery shared by Kertelreiter. That’s often how it goes. Wendy LeBlanc and Patrick Mann met in Seattle while working in the tech industry. At that time, cider culture was just beginning to blossom there, and they thought it might also take off in Europe. Since every helping hand was needed on Patrick’s family farm in Unterkirnach, and the timing was right, they decided to move back to Germany and start processing orchard fruit. The farm itself dates back to 1785, hence the name. And like much of the rest of Baden-Württemberg, the eastern edge of the Black Forest is home to many old scattered orchards that deserve to be preserved and cultivated once again.
Wendy and Patrick source their fruit (with one exception, which we’ll get to shortly) from untreated trees within about a 25-kilometer radius and produce different drinks depending on the year and harvest, sometimes more apple-based, sometimes more pear-based, depending on weather conditions and tree alternation cycles. We’re trying two bottles today, and no, their hopped apple sparkling wine isn’t among them this time. We’ve already had apple and hops recently. Of course, I ordered it anyway, and it turned out to be the perfect finish to a slightly overindulgent wine evening, a repair beer made from apples so to speak. You should try it, it’s really good. But since I believe cider lends itself wonderfully to being combined with other ingredients, we’re drinking a bottle of Currant 2023, where apples are co-fermented with whole blackcurrants. And we’re also trying Forêt Noire from 2022, which is the aforementioned exception in their lineup. Some of the fruit for this cider comes from outside their region, from Franconia, to be precise. At least that’s where the trees are planted, a selection of French varieties rarely found in Germany. This portion of the cuvée was initially fermented with wine yeast. The other portion comes from an experiment with local fruit processed according to French methods, where fermentation is stopped shortly before completion through repeated racking.
We’re starting with Forêt Noire. It smells spicy and somehow structured, almost as if you already know how it will feel when you drink it. There’s a bit of wildness here and there, freshness, a hint of candle wax and herbs, and the longer you hold your nose over the glass, the mellower the apple fruit becomes amidst everything else. The structure indeed makes its way onto the tongue, there’s texture, fresh acidity, and an apple flavor somewhere between sweet and sour. It’s long-lasting, as you hold the cider in your mouth, its aroma evolves, becoming smokier and spicier, while each sip gains more pull on the other side. It’s powerful, intense, and perhaps somewhere between what we’ve tried in recent weeks already, somewhere between France and Germany, perhaps. Or maybe that’s just my imagination, it doesn’t matter because it’s excellent regardless of where its varieties originate.
The blackcurrants give Currant a stunning color somewhere between strawberry syrup and rust red. I didn’t know what to expect, but it smells like cassis, intensely like cassis. The first two or three times you smell it, there’s so much blackcurrant that there’s no room for anything else alongside all that cassis. Cassis is one of those flavors you either love or don’t, it’s so specific that there isn’t much room for negotiation about it. Like caraway or anise or something similar. I love cassis, if only because our little blackcurrant bush reliably produces fruit year after year here in our garden corner. Unlike those gooseberries around it, they can get lost. But that’s another story. You need to give Currant a bit of time, or perhaps give your nose some time, because eventually the blackcurrant forest thins out a bit, becoming spicier and more musty with hints of apple peeking through here and there. It also has quite a bit of pull when drinking, not as much as red currants (if you don’t know what I mean, try Apple & Currant by von Wiesen, that one has laser-like acidity), but still plenty of power. The fruit on the tongue is even clearer than it was on the nose, it has fantastic tannins, great length, and plenty of juiciness. It’s absolutely delicious and becomes even fresher with air like Forêt Noire did before it. Toward the end of the bottle, the blackcurrant note recedes further into the background, it becomes more appley, more cider-like, but no less enjoyable, just different. If you have even a slight appreciation for cassis flavors, Currant comes highly recommended, it’s truly fantastic stuff!