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Design by Web Productions |
| "The art of distilling has been revived in the orchards of Somerset..." | ||
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| Jonathan Ray investigates apple core values in Somerset | ||
| Pass Vale Farm, on the southern edge of the Somerset Levels, is as picturesque as can be. Half-timbered outhouses surround a courtyard filled with wooden barrels, crates of bottles and apple cartons. Daisy, the elderly farm pony, surveys the scene from her stable door as a pair of pigs rootle beneath an ancient apple tree. It's very Darling Buds of May. | ||
| Cider has been made on this farm for
two centuries and the current owner, Julian Temperley, has chalked
up more than 30 vintages. Forty different varieties of apple,
including Kingston Black, Dabinett, Stoke Red, Yarlington Mill and
Harry Masters are grown in the 150 acres of orchards, and about
1,000 tons of fruit are pressed a year. "Being a cider-maker is
halfway between being a rag-and-bone man and a gipsy," says
Temperley, with a chuckle. "There's a certain amount of roguery, or perhaps I should say mystique, involved, but given that Somerset has a thousand-year tradition of cider-making, I reckon it's something I can be proud of." And Temperley has good reason. |
 Merry-making products: Julian Temperley |
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| His prize-winning ciders have a formidable reputation, not least thanks to his fabled Cider Bus, an ancient double-decker that he crams with bottles and barrels and coaxes along to rock festivals such as Glastonbury and Beautiful Days, where it is a legendary magnet for merry-making. | ||
| "Cider-makers just aren't very respectable, are they?" he asks his wife, Diana, as she joins us for a glass of delicious and refreshing bottled-fermented sparkling dry cider. "You can say that again," she says, giving her somewhat dishevelled husband a look. | ||
| We polish off the bottle and move on to his medium-dry farm-pressed cider, which we drink with unpasteurised Montgomery cheese. Monkey, the fluff-ball of a dog that belongs to Alice Temperley, the couple's celebrated fashion-designer daughter, settles at my feet and, as is the way with cider, the afternoon begins to slip away. | ||
| Yet it is not cider that has brought me here but cider brandy. Fed up with simply fermenting apples, Temperley decided to go a stage further and distil them. After years of stubborn persistence, he was granted the country's first full cider distilling licence by HM Customs, in 1989. His Somerset Cider Brandy has wowed the critics ever since. | ||
| "Temperley is both innovative and passionate," says my old friend Jason Yapp of Yapp Brothers. "He might look like a mad professor who has dressed in haste, but he's a great champion of local produce and speaks with the modest, clear confidence of someone who has truly mastered his métier. His brandies are undoubtedly world-class. I have been plying my friends with his inimitable 15-year-old for a while now and the reaction is always the same: stunned silence followed by a broad smile." Temperley has no truck with such products as Somerset Brie and dislikes being known as a maker of Somerset Calvados. "We have different soil, climate, apples and barrels to Normandy," he says. | ||
| "We follow a similar tradition, it is true, and treat our product with similar respect, but we differ in the way that Bordeaux differs from Burgundy." Apples are gathered in the autumn, blended and pressed. The juice is fermented in huge oak vats and, after three months, the cider is distilled in one of two elderly French continuous stills, Josephine or Fifi. The spirit is then put into old sherry casks, or new oak barrels from Hungary and the Limousin and Allier forests of France, with Temperley bottling the results at three, five, 10 and 15 years old. | ||
| "I must have been crackers," he says. "I started distilling out of vanity but it has become an obsession. We're incredibly niche, but have fanatical customers whose loyalty keeps us afloat and we hang on by our fingertips." One last gulp and we clear the cider bottles away. Before we get stuck into the brandies, though, Temperley insists that we sample some Kingston Black Apple Aperitif. This is his version of Cognac's Pineau des Charentes and Armagnac's Floc de Gascogne, an 18% vol blend of brandy and apple juice. It is wonderfully, appley sweet but with a subtle dryness and a kick from the spirit. The Somerset Pomona, its digestif counterpart, is fuller-bodied and slightly drier, with a smooth butterscotch finish. | ||
| It is equally scrumptious. | ||
| Ignoring my incipient head-spins, I try to keep pace with my host as we wade, spittoonless, through the brandies: the rich, ripe, mellow and sweetish five-year-old; the velvety, whisky-like 10-year-old and the exquisite, smooth, elegant and appley 15-year-old. They are first-rate. | ||
| Job done, I pack away my notebook, only to find that Temperley is now pressing a glass of his headily aromatic Apple Eau de Vie on me. He may or may not be crackers, but he is certainly dangerous. I call my wife and tell her not to meet the expected train. | ||
| Suddenly, I long to know what Alice Temperley thinks of her father and, with his help, I call her mobile number. Inevitably, she is in New York, speeding in a taxi to another fashion show. | ||
| "Of course he's crackers!" she laughs. "We all are - it would be boring if we weren't. But he had a vision, followed it and created something world-class. I couldn't be prouder of him. Just don't let him lead you astray." Too late, I mumble, too late. | ||
| Somerset Cider Brandy products are available at Waitrose and Yapp Bros (01747 860423). | ||
