Roadcider 2024: Orange

An ongoing collaborative project with friend and fermentation guru Lucien Alperstein, this cider is our second release to use apples deliberately planted and grown in an orchard.

We have made cider together with Lucien since 2018 at Wildflower but this ongoing "Roadcider" project is very much his creative direction and drive. In Lucien's own words, this cider has been a long time coming and is our second release to use apples deliberately planted and grown in an orchard. And what rate and beautiful apples they are and what an amazing orchard they come from. You can read more about the making of this cider, the apples and the orchard below, a very worthwhile read.

Dry, sparkling cider in the pet nat style. Made from unsprayed fruit grown at Borrodell, Wiradjuri country. Featuring some of the best cider apple varieties you won’t find at the shops: Kingston Black, Dabinett, Golden Harvey, Bramley, Yarlington Mill + more.

From Lucien:

It’s that time of year already! The apple blossoms have dropped and tiny little apple fruitlets the size of your thumb are starting to swell.

This release is our second to use apples deliberately planted and grown in an orchard. Around 2014 I was brewing a lot of home brew beer and wanted to try and find some true cider variety apples. I got in touch with the unofficial demigod of cider apples on this continent, David Pickering. Overflowing with knowledge, enthusiasm and kindness, David suggested a few orchards I might get in touch with. But, I got sidetracked in a big way by roadside fruit and the magic and fun of driving around picking feral apples on country backroads. Turns out one of my favourite things to do is finding delicious and interesting roadside fruit trees, remembering their tannins, the soft orange blush and tasting fruit unlike anything you can find in a shop. There’s so much poetry in apple trees, particularly roadside trees, but I’m not going to go too deep today. So, for the next decade I made cider from hundreds of roadside fruit trees, a digression that led to the Roadcider moniker. But when you want to pick a few tonnes of fruit from the side of the road you need to set aside a few weeks. One tree every kilometre or so, tended to only by the winds and rains of the season, takes a lot longer to pick than a few rows each with 100 trees, pruned on a semi-regular basis. So, for 2024, pressed for time and thrown off by how early the season came, we assembled a crack team of some of the sweetest apple pickers ever to grace the western plains and descended on Borrodell orchard at the foot of Mount Canobolas on Wiradjuri Country.

Borrodell grows some of the most sought after cider-variety apples available in the world. Bittersharp and bittersweet varieties like Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill, Somerset Redstreak, Dabinett, Frequin Rouge and Fréquin Tardive de la Sarthe. Ultra sweet and rough-skinned little flavour balls called Golden Harvey, and Bramley, the reisling of the apple world. One thing that sets most cider apart from wine is that you generally want to blend a few different types of apples. The sweet, aromatic ones often have a bit of acid but zero tannin so are a bit one-dimensional when fermented alone, the acid varieties often lack body and the tannic apples are generally very low in acid (with a few exceptions to all of these “rules”, of course).

Fruit was already falling off the tree over a month earlier than in 2023. We raced out in early March and picked a blend a bit higher in acid varieties than last year. Lots of Kingston Black (tannin, acid and richness), Bramley (acid acid acid), Dabinett (earthy,  deep, tannic but extremely low acid) and Golden Harvey (aromatic), with a handful of other tannic and acid-driven cider varieties. The juice was fermented with yeasts from the apples themselves and left to rest 6 months before bottling in spring.

Every year I try to mess around and make photos in the style of William Mullan (@pomme_william). For the labels this year I had some White Transparent (a very early-ripening, high acid, translucent variety) and was messing around some different coloured backdrops. We’re a bit past peak brat but it felt right when we sent them off to the printer and still feels right today.

There are hundreds of named apple varieties across this continent, and thousands more wild variants growing feral by the side of the road anywhere cold enough to get close to a frost in winter from the eastern seaboard to the west and everywhere south. If you ever find yourself near an apple growing region in autumn, I urge you to try and find some roadside fruit, or an orchard selling some heirlooms you won’t find at the shops. Classics like the French Fenouillet Gris, a dull yellow skinned beauty with super aromatic juicy flesh with a very distinct fennel seed flavour, the rough pocked sandpaper skin of a Golden Harvey with unbelievably sweet, juicy and crisp flesh inside, the shock of rough tannins of a Frequin Rouge, a cider or cooking apple with more more mouth-drying tannin than raw quince, or the acid shock of a giant Bramley you’ll need two hands to hold. 

Wine is fine, and beer, sure, but don’t forget to make some space for cider, the underdog. Like the clarinet player in the rock band, the rollerblader, or the boogie boarder at the beach, apples and cider brings a joyful something to the world that is hard to name. 

And the cider. It’s refreshing, with a little more acid than last year but still with some nice structure from the tannic varieties of apples in there. It’s a great summer drink now and as it ages it’ll mellow and become richer, a little more serious and continue to be perfect for any occasion. 

Ok enough, reach out if you want to talk more. I hope you like it. 

180 bottles available online - limit 6 per person.